A Working Man: Needs more work

A Working Man (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for drug content, constant profanity and relentless strong and gory violence

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

As demonstrated in last year’s The Beekeeper, blend director David Ayer and star Jason Statham, and the result is hyper-violence.

 

The calm before the storm: Jenny Garcia (Arianna Rivas) goes over construction project
details with Levon Cole (Jason Statham, right), while her doting father (Michael Peña)
watches approvisngly.

Although this new film doesn’t feature a death quite as appalling as The Beekeeper’s notorious off-the-unfinished-bridge sequence, there’s no shortage of baddies getting pummeled, shot, stabbed, sliced, diced, defenestrated, blown away and blown up by all manner of knives, guns, grenades and makeshift bombs.

Along with Statham’s signature karate, wushu, Wing Chun kung fu, Brazilian jiu jitsu and kickboxing.

 

At best, the result is a vicious, violent and vicarious guilty pleasure, but there’s no denying the satisfaction of watching deplorable villains get what they deserve. And goodness, scripters Ayer, Chuck Dixon and Sylvester Stallone came up with a bevy of baddies: Russian Mafia lords and goons, opportunistic mid-level snakes, human traffickers and a squadron of biker thugs.

 

Can one man really take on such a barrage, and live to tell the tale?

 

Silly question. We’re talking about Jason Statham.

 

The title credits montage reveals that Levon Cade (Statham) served as a member of the British Royal Guard during some nasty military action. In the present day, he has become a construction foreman employed by Joe Garcia (Michael Peña), who runs the operation alongside wife Carla (Noemi Gonzalez) and college-age daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas).

 

Aside from being haunted by his former military actions, Levon also is blamed by his wealthy ex-father-in-law, Jordan (Richard Heap, truly unpleasant), for his late wife’s suicide. To that end, Jordan seeks full custody of his adorable adolescent granddaughter, Merry (Isla Gie), because he sees Levon as a PTSD-riddled ex-soldier unfit to raise a child.

 

This is why Levon has been sleeping in his truck outside the construction site each night, and subsisting on home-cooked meals supplied by the Garcias and other sympathetic construction workers, while saving money to battle Jordan in court.

 

Set-ups of this nature are key to Statham’s popularity, because — as is the case here — he often plays troubled, blue-collar guys with a sense of honor, and an unwillingness to bow down to any sort of opportunistic scoundrels determined to screw regular folks.

Military Wives: Be sure to enlist!

Military Wives (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.5.20

Director Peter Cattaneo makes adorable feel-good films that cleverly blend light, character-driven humor with social commentary that often pokes at the British class system.

Lisa (Sharon Horgan, left) can't quite believe it when, instead of just allowing their group
to sing a song, Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas) insists on beginning with high-falutin'
vocal exercises.

He put himself on the map with 1997’s The Full Monty, and if his subsequent films didn’t live up to that big-screen debut — 2001’s Lucky Break and 2008’s The Rocker — it’s only because he set the bar so high the first time.

Well, Military Wives — available via Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms — hits all the markers that made Monty so entertaining. The cherry on top is that Rosanne Flynn and Rachel Tunnard’s script is inspired by deeply moving actual events: a poignant (and well-timed) reminder that people from disparate backgrounds can accomplish marvelous things when working together.

The setting is 2010, at England’s (fictitious) Flitcroft military base. (Production actually took place at North Yorkshire’s Catterick Garrison, the world’s largest British army base.) The ongoing war in Afghanistan has just entered the “surge” phase, with increasing numbers of Allied troops being deployed overseas; this includes many of the active-duty soldiers at Flitcroft.

Their wives and girlfriends, left behind on base, have limited options for distracting themselves from worst-case fears. Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas), wife of the company commander, decides to take a more active hand in gathering the women for group activities. By doing so, she steps on the toes of Lisa (Sharon Horgan), the base’s newly appointed Social Committee chair.

They’re a classic case of oil and water, destined never to mix. Kate is a condescending, high-minded aristocrat who throws her status around; Scott Thomas delivers just the right note of smug entitlement. The earthier, working-class Lisa has long enjoyed being “just one of the girls,” and she’s not about to let her new “promotion” get in the way of that.

Kate wants to organize productive, formally structured activities; Lisa — and the rest of the women — prefer informal morning coffee klatches and wine-fueled evenings.