All Action, No Soul: The Working Man is Lifeless.

When you sit down to watch a Jason Statham movie, you pretty much know what you’re going to get. You’re going to see Statham’s signature charm, you’re going to see him beat up a whole bunch of bad guys, and…well, that’s pretty much it. As much as I love the guy, his filmography isn’t exactly packed with Oscar winners. In fact, a lot of his films are forgettably generic at best, so I didn’t have terribly high hopes for his latest flick, A Working Man. Sure, I figured the action would be fun, but I had my doubts about the story. Nevertheless, as a big action fan, I decided to roll the dice and give this movie a shot anyway, so I bought a ticket for opening weekend and hoped for the best.

A Working Man was directed and co-written by David Ayer, and it stars Jason Statham, Michael Peña, and David Harbour. In the film, Levon Cade is a former Royal Marine Commando who now leads a peaceful life as the head of a construction team. He doesn’t have much use for his combat skills these days, but that all changes when his boss’s teenage daughter is kidnapped by a dangerous gang of human traffickers. This horrible turn of events compels Levon to unleash his inner Liam Neeson and go after the bad guys who’ve (pardon the pun) taken the poor girl, and as I’m sure you can guess, a whole lot of mayhem ensues.

On paper, that sounds like a decent-enough premise for a Jason Statham flick, but unfortunately, the execution isn’t up to par. Like I expected, the action in A Working Man is pretty good, but the setup is so bad it kills the fun before it even starts.

The first act briefly touches on the major points we need to know to understand the story, but it stubbornly refuses to do anything more than the absolute bare minimum. It gives us just enough that we know what’s going on, but it’s nowhere near enough to make us like these characters or care about their plight.

For instance, there’s a moment when Levon gets to show off his world-class fighting skills before things really go south, and it’s one of the laziest scenes I’ve seen in a while. A group of nondescript hoodlums show up at his construction site to rough up one of his workers, and of course, Levon intervenes and saves the day. He fights off the entire clique all by himself, so there’s no doubt in our minds that he really is the toughest guy in this movie.

But there’s just one problem. A Working Man doesn’t bother to explain who these people are or why they’re there. We have no idea what they want with this poor construction worker, so the scene has no narrative weight to it. It’s about as emotionally affecting as a random fight clip on YouTube, so it does nothing to get us invested in these characters or their story.

To take another example, the scene where Levon’s boss asks him to rescue his kidnapped daughter plays out in a fairly cliched fashion. At first Levon refuses because he’s left the action hero life behind, but almost immediately afterwards, he changes his mind. It’s the kind of way-too-fast 180 we’ve seen a million times before, but surprisingly, that’s not the worst thing about it.

See, Levon has a little girl himself, so when he declines to save his boss’s daughter, we think he’s going to see his own kid and realize how much pain his boss must be in. But that’s not what happens. Instead, Levon goes to visit an old friend of his, and after a conversation the camera mostly skips over, he agrees to take the job.

There’s no back and forth discussion, no grappling with the ramifications of his decision, and certainly no compelling drama driving the change. He just decides to say yes, and that’s it. It’s even lazier than the construction site fight scene, so if you care about competent storytelling at all, this amateurish writing is going to make you roll your eyes so hard they might not roll back.

To be fair, nothing else in the opening act of A Working Man is quite as bad as those two moments, but none of it is particularly good either. This part of the film feels like it’s just mechanically speeding through a checklist of points it has to hit, so by the time Levon set out on his quest, I had already checked out emotionally.

I simply couldn’t bring myself to care about what was happening on screen, so it didn’t matter how good the action was. With no emotional weight behind them, even the best fights in the world will feel like little more than visual noise, and that’s exactly what happens here. Like I said before, A Working Man kills the fun before it even gets started, and not even Jason Statham’s signature charm can salvage it. The inept setup alone makes this one of the worst movies of the year so far, so if you’re in the mood to watch an action hero mete out some much-needed justice, don’t waste your time with this film. Just go back and watch John Wick again.