The Sylvester Stallone and David Ayer-cowritten Jason Statham Vehicle A Working Man is Goofy Fun, but it's no Beekeeper

It's meat and potato comfort food for dudes

Every week, paid subscribers to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas participate in a poll to determine what movie I must see and write about for the newsletter.

I am professionally and morally obligated to see the new theatrical release that wins the poll, but sometimes I’m disappointed in the results and decide, as a bonus, to see the option that lost the vote as well.

That happened last week. You kind souls chose The Alto Knights, but I really wanted to see and write about Snow White because it looked unspeakably awful. Vigorous pans of movies I despised tend to do much better with readers than movies I enjoy or feel ambivalently about.

So, I was not surprised that my zero-star evisceration of Snow White did much better than my piece on The Alto Nights, a movie that will make you sluggishly sit up and groan, “meh.”

Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas made the Substack charts for the first time in history, scoring 36 on the top humor sites. I was surprised and pleased. It’s safe to assume the Snow White review I did not have to write made the difference.

There’s another reason I regularly choose to double up and write up two new movies instead of one: I REALLY want to encourage people to become paid subscribers to my newsletter.

It is REALLY important to me. For just five dollars a month, less than the cost of a single cup of coffee from Starbucks, you can help a struggling pop culture writer survive a uniquely bleak media landscape.

Incidentally, what is the deal with the crazy names for Starbucks’ coffees? I wasn’t aware I needed an English-to-Italian dictionary to order a damn cup of espresso! Whatever happened to small, medium, and large? They seem to work just fine for EVERY OTHER BUSINESS IN THE COUNTRY!

There’s another reason I regularly see twice as many new movies than is required: I LOVE movies. They’re great! I suppose you could call me a buff.

More specifically, I enjoy Jason Statham movies. I love ‘em! Remember that movie where he fought a giant shark? That was great. And the Fast and the Furious films: I can’t get enough of them!

I particularly enjoyed last year’s David Ayer-directed The Beekeeper, a glorious throwback to the transcendent camp of Cannon’s heyday.

There are many things that I love about The Beekeeper. Just thinking about it makes me smile, not unlike how you’d smile when becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter, knowing that you have done something kind and, consequently, are entitled to feel superior to less generous souls because you ARE objectively better than people who are not paid subscribers.

The more paid subscribers I have, the more time and energy I can devote to this newsletter.

In The Beekeeper, Statham plays the titular beekeeper. He keeps bees as a hobby, because he desperately needs honey but cannot afford the store-bought variety, but he’s also an alum of a secretive, world-saving organization of ass-kicking badasses ALSO called the Beekeepers.

What are the odds?

How great is that? I also loved that the main villain the president’s asshole business bro son (Josh Hutcherson, who is way more fun as a shitty bad guy than as a good guy in Five Nights at Freddy’s), who operates a phishing scam that helped fund his mother’s political career.

I wanted to see A Working Man because it reunites Statham and David Ayer in a vehicle that casts Statham as Levon Cade, an unassuming gentleman who turns out to be a world-class killer with a body count in the three or four figures.

Levon is the subject of eleven Levon Cade novels by comic book legend Chuck Dixon, best known for creating Bane. Sylvester Stallone wanted to turn the Levon Cade novels into a television show. That somehow resulted in Statham playing Levon Cade on the big screen.

In A Working Man, Statham portrays the titular blue-collar gent, a Royal Marine Commando who traded in a violent life of kicking ass and murdering bad guys for the Queen for a more modest and less violent existence working as a foreman for a family construction business led by Joe Garcia (Michael Pena).

I got excited when I saw Pena’s name in the credits, as the hero’s kind-heared, wisecracking boss. He is a delight who makes every film he’s in better. His absence was one of the reasons Ant-Man: Quantumania was such a disappointment.

I was equally disappointed to discover that Pena is barely in the film. How in the hell are you going to cast someone like Pena in something and then give him five minutes of screentime and nothing to do?

Pena has a role in the proceedings, but it’s as a plot point rather than a significant character. The Garcia business is like a family, so when a Russian sex trafficking ring abducts Joe’s daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) from a QAnon cultist’s wet dreams, it falls upon Statham’s friend of the family to track down the people responsible and murder them.

Levon pretends to be a career criminal to get information on the people behind the sinsiter sex trafficking ring in a way that reminded me of the many hilarious scenes in Hardcore where George C. Scott goes undercover as the least convincing porn mogul in film history.

Everything about Scott’s ramrod-straight Midwestern businessman screams “square out of his league,” yet he somehow manages to fool at least one person.

Statham is nowhere near as square as Scott, but his character inspires abundant unintended laughter during his wonderfully implausible time undercover as the world’s least convincing drug dealer.

A Working Man marks yet another collaboration between Statham and Stallone, his costar in the Expendables franchise and the screenwriter and the writer-producer of the forgettable 2013 Statham vehicle Homefront.

Statham’s trademark as an action hero is a light touch and a winking awareness of the ridiculousness of his career. He is perpetually in on the joke. He never takes himself seriously. That’s what makes him so much fun.

Stallone is the opposite. Except for Demolition Man, he tends towards earnestness and sincerity. His films are full of sweaty conviction and misplaced seriousness. He MEANS it, man, in a way that’s something powerful and sometimes hilarious.

It makes sense that Stallone would have a writing credit here since he famously worked for Cannon in the 1980s as an actor and a writer on Cobra and Over the Top.

Ayer understands Statham’s gifts as a performer and the needs of an audience with a bottomless appetite for watching him beat up an army of poorly differentiated henchmen young enough to be his children.

Like Stallone, Statham is a few inches shy of six feet. Yet he’s such a ferocious fighter and world-class badass that he never seems in danger. Statham versus the entire Russian mafia seems like a fair fight.

The outcome is never in doubt. We know exactly what will happen. We know that Statham will emerge victorious, an unbeatable force for good in a dark universe. The pleasure lies in seeing how Ayer and Statham reach their inevitable destination in the land of happy endings.

A Working Man is not as much fun as The Beekeepers. It lacks that film’s brilliantly bonkers premise, unforgettable supporting characters, and masterful command of camp, but it has many of the earlier film’s virtues.

Like The Beekeeper, this is meat-and-potatoes comfort food for bros, dudes, and guys alike. It’s devoid of subtlety, understatement, and subtext. That’s not necessarily bad.

It’s a film of modest but substantial pleasures that unfortunately wears out its welcome with a runtime of just under two hours.

There’s no reason this needs to be 116 minutes long. Ayer could have wrapped things up in 90 minutes without losing anything essential.

I went to a weekday morning screening alone for the first time in years. I saw A Working Man at an 11  o'clock screening less than twelve hours after finishing Death of a Unicorn. It was fun. I fucking love seeing movies by myself but I also love seeing movies with my son.

There’s no reason to pay exorbitant theater ticket prices for A Working Man, but if you enjoy watching Jason Statham beat people up the way I do, it should hold you until the Beekeeper sequel's release in the not too distant future.

Three stars out of five