April 7th, 2025

I love Crank 2: High Voltage. A friend recently described it to me as “The Gremlins 2 to [the original Crank]” Jason Statham has an energy and a buy in to him that elevates every single action movie he steps into. At no point does he look like he’s regretting his decision to be something even as horrible as Uwe Boll’s In the Name of the King. It’s this dedication to the craft that pushes his work up a step. And when he gets to work with talented film makers? As he did in the Crank franchise, or in James Wan’s Furious 7? The white knuckle effect he already has tightens it’s grip.

It’s frustrating then to see him languishing on the vine of a director who seems to think that edge-lord brooding is the tone we need for our modern action vehicles. David Ayer’s A Working Man is much more concerned with taking itself seriously as opposed to having fun. The issue is that that’s Statham’s job. He takes it seriously, the movie has fun. Or at least that’s how it should be. Even Ayer’s The Beekeeper, which has an absolutely absurd plot has the tone of a Bourne film. No playfulness is to be found in that or A Working Man even as Statham is meeting with a motorcycle drug kingpin that sits on a throne of exhaust pipes.

The stakes from the get go are akin to Taken, Jason Statham (he has a character name but I cannot be bothered to look it up) works as a construction site boss, and his boss’s daughter has been kidnapped by Russian gangsters off the streets of Chicago. Statham is a former Royal Marine Commando and will use his particular set of skills to find the Russians and make them regret their choices. Along the way he runs into a cavalcade of odd miscreants in the underground crime network of the Chicagoland area. All of the odd characters have the tone of John Wick villains, but without any of the soul. They are as forgettable as if they had been nameless bad guys in hoodies. A Working Man tries to blatantly rip off other much more successful action franchises in just about every way imaginable.

Jason Statham also has a daughter which is why he’s so determined to find his boss’s daughter. Because the only way someone would bother caring about a missing girl is if they too knew another female! At one point a Russian gangster asks him, “Why do you care so much about one girl?” Statham asks him if he has a daughter, to which the Russian responds in the negative. “Then you’ll never understand.” gruffs Mr. Statham. An absolutely wild conclusion to come to, especially from the guy trying to save the day.

One other confounding piece comes from the intro credits. I’m a sucker for intro credits, something movies have largely been avoiding these days, preferring to have them at the end of the movie (we can blame the MCU for that). But I always enjoy them. As the credits are rolling out for some reason there are CGI renderings of various bullets, guns, no issue with any of that. But at least two separate times it shows an American flag? He’s a former Royal Marine Commando? It just feels like they had a lot of Union Jacks in there at some point and either via a studio exec note or a test screening someone said “Ehhh… this movie about guns and being a blue collar worker isn’t obnoxiously nationalistic enough, let’s throw some stars and stripes in there.” It feels like I may be focused on a minor detail, but the energy of that decision is felt throughout the film.

Even as I mull over the action set pieces now, nothing particularly comes to mind. The most fun had is in the final piece where Statham is raiding a classic bad guy compound, almost certainly located somewhere in the Chicagoland suburbs according to the logic of the film (probably La Grange, those cake eaters would hide a Russian mafia compound), where Jason shoots all the Russians as well as some crooked cops and saves the girl. In the end it’s just a painfully run of the mill action movie, the like we should have come to expect from it’s director, but that I had hoped for more from Jason Statham.

1.5/5