They Call Him the ‘Working Man’

Plus: ‘Los Frikis’ rock out amid tragedy.

‘A Working Man’ Review

‘A Working Man’ (MovieStillsDB)

Last January, director David Ayer and star Jason Statham scored a surprise hit with The Beekeeper. The high-concept action movie about a government operative working as a beekeeper (both literally as a keeper of bees and figuratively as part of a secret agency known as the “Beekeepers”) did big business because it was an efficiently tidy piece of storytelling, had great villains you enjoyed seeing Statham hurt in amusingly horrific ways, and, importantly, leaned into bee-centric puns, with constant riffs on protecting the hive and such. I unironically loved it and am very much looking forward to the sequel.

Needless to say, I was excited to hear about A Working Man. On paper, the elements are all there. David Ayer directs and Jason Statham stars. It’s got a high-concept title (Statham is not an apiarist this time but a former military man who now works as the foreman at a construction site; he is the titular working man) and a seemingly simple premise (he needs to rescue his boss’s kidnapped daughter). Importantly, it has villains you want to see get hurt: Human traffickers like those who have taken her are the scum of the Earth and no level of violence you inflict on them is disproportionate to their evil.

And while I ultimately enjoyed A Working Man—there is in the third act a great deal of righteously cathartic violence of the sort I always welcome—its deficiencies demonstrate the lightning-in-a-bottle aspect of Ayer and Statham’s previous collaboration. The new movie’s screenplay (cowritten by Ayer and Oscar nominee Sylvester Stallone) is unduly complicated, ping-ponging Statham back and forth between Russian gangsters, American human traffickers, and a gang of black motorcycle-riding meth dealers; all too frequently, Statham’s Levon Cade kills the guys he’s interrogating before he can get enough information out of them in a way that feels designed to pad the runtime.

The villains are certainly evil but relatively ineffective in their efforts; except for Dutch (Chidi Ajufo), the head of the motorcycle meth gang, no one ever really feels like much of a threat to Cade because there isn’t a single competent individual in his rogue’s gallery. The human trafficking duo of Viper and Artemis (Emmett J. Scanlan and Eve Mauro, respectively) spend most of the movie literally bumbling around the screen and the Russian mobsters are an escalating series of grotesques, from the brothers in matching tracksuits to a failson who looks like a skinnier version of Nandor the Relentless from What We Do in the Shadows to a duo that looked oddly like Russian Uncle Fester and Russian Alfred E. Neuman. (I will say that costume designer Tiziana Corvisier does a good job of dressing all these people in comically evil fashion.)

And I was terribly disappointed that Ayer and Stallone didn’t really do anything with the idea of Statham as a construction worker. I wanted puns about workplace safety and tools, I wanted vengeance meted out with nailguns and circular saws. Again, the film closes with pleasingly cathartic violence, but it still feels like a missed opportunity that the whole “working man” conceit more or less fell by the wayside.

And yet. This is the sort of movie where our heroes can say something like “We did some righteous shit” and you mutter “hell yeah” because you know more righteous shit is about to happen. And it’s the sort of movie where one of the villains asks why Cade is doing this and Cade just asks if he has a daughter and that’s it, that’s the whole thing, that’s enough. Sometimes you have to do some righteous shit (kill a bunch of people) because you’d want someone else to do the same for your daughter. Did I laugh out loud at a couple of the kills in the final moments? You know I did. One thing that Stallone (who costarred with Statham in several Expendables movies) and Ayer understand perfectly is the comic potential of doing “righteous shit.”

So no, sadly, A Working Man isn’t as good as The Beekeeper. But few movies are. It’s still a solid Jason Statham action movie, though, and that’s enough.

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On this week’s Bulwark Goes to Hollywood I talked to Bobby Miller about his new novel Situation Nowhere, which I have described to folks as “Brazil by way of Idiocracy.” I think you’ll enjoy our chat, and if you enjoy our chat, you’ll enjoy his book. Check it out here. And listen to the podcast!

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Assigned Viewing: Los Frikis (VOD)

‘Los Frikis’

Out now on video-on-demand following a limited theatrical run, Los Frikis is a stirring reminder of the power of art and of finding community in the face of authoritarian abuse and privation.

Set in Cuba in 1991 amid economic ruin following the collapse of Fidel Castro’s patrons in the Soviet Union, Los Frikis opens with a title card informing us that, following the Cuban Revolution, rock-and-roll music was outlawed by Castro’s Communist regime. The titular “Frikis” were Cuban punks—mohawk-sporting, skateboard-riding musicians—who risked arrest and torture at the hands of the Cuban police if caught listening to American radio stations or playing the forbidden music.

What jumps out in the early moments of writer-director duo Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’s film is the misery of life under the Castroite regime. It’s not just the hunger suffered by Paco (Héctor Medina) and his brother Gustavo (Eros de la Puente) as they scrounge for food in the ruins of Cuban society; it’s the ever-present fear of arrest, the guards with rifles looming over them as they chop sugarcane in the glaring sun, the Fidelista iconography on every wall. One of the most chilling moments comes early on when Paco paints an unconventional X on the face of the leader; his friends freak out, terrified, understanding that he has committed a capital offense. They could all be killed for this.

Music is a release. We in America take the ability to listen to “Come As You Are” for granted; the idea that an overplayed Nirvana single might serve as a rallying cry is hard to imagine. As is the idea that injecting oneself with a syringe full of AIDS-infected blood in the hopes of getting sent to a sanitarium far from Havana would be preferable to living life on the streets. Yet that is the decision made by Paco, who finds himself faced with a choice between starvation and a slightly slower death.

Most of the film takes place in the sanitarium, where Gustavo joins Paco after faking his own HIV infection. This is not a particularly plot-heavy movie; it is, rather, a portrait of moments, a sketch of a place and a time and a people and the community created by the sanitarium’s caretaker, Maria (Adria Arjona). Nilson and Schwartz capture these instants with startling beauty; it’s a great-looking film, and cinematographer Santiago Gonzalez deserves credit for capturing both the camp’s communal camaraderie and the intimate terror of living with and around a death sentence handed down by one’s own blood rather than the police state.

This is a difficult sort of movie to get made—it’s the first film for Nilson and Schwartz since their 2019 breakout indie hit, The Peanut Butter Falcon—and producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller deserve credit for using some of their Spider-Verse clout to help get it made. It’s also a difficult movie to get people to see; subtitles are always a tough sell for American moviegoers. But Los Frikis is a startling portrait of a world not too far from our own in distance or time that nevertheless feels a universe away, as well as a stirring reminder of the power art holds to captivate our souls.