Flasz On Film

The wish fulfilment fantasy of a man heading out to rescue a kidnapped young woman is as old as storytelling itself. In fact, you could likely find examples of this archetypal narrative in the Greek mythology where Hades abducted Persephone which sent Demeter on a quest to retrieve her. Orpheus went to the underworld to retrieve Eurydice. Homer’s The Iliad is an account of an entire bloody war launched by king Agamemnon to recover Helen abducted by Paris. This age-old concept is essentially a perspective reversal of the story of Rapunzel or the Sleeping Beauty, told from the perspective of Prince Charming. It’s been with us forever. 

Therefore, it’s no surprise that such a fundamental storytelling motif has become a mainstay within the world of cinema as well. From the canonical visual concept of a damsel in distress, hogtied and left on the railroad tracks for someone like Popeye to rescue her, all the way to Liam Neeson using his “particular set of skills” to retrieve his daughter from the hands of human traffickers in Paris, this idea has consistently permeated the screen-centered culture. While it morphed between apotheosis of paternal competence (Commando, Taken), straightforward revenge fantasies (Rolling Thunder, Man on Fire, Mandy, Rambo: Last Blood, The Equalizer series), thinly veiled excuses for genre indulgence (The Searchers) and more thematically nuanced explorations of morality (Hardcore, Taxi Driver, Prisoners), the concept of a man on a mission to find and save a young female in peril has always remained a part of the landscape of big screen entertainment.  

And while it is a genuinely intriguing idea to challenge and question exactly what makes this particular narrative—one that assumes a woman needs a man to save her—so enduring, because it is easy for such storytelling to either become implicitly underpinned by casual misogyny or for this label to be appended to it during critical evaluation by politically-inclined commentators with an axe to grind, there is a role for these movies to play. It is not to objectify or otherwise deploy female peril as a device for generating cheap thrills, but rather as a potent fantasy that places men who see themselves as protectors of their partners and children as knights in shining armour and avatars to inhabit while daydreaming about saving the day while out and about at a local park. Men who otherwise may feel displaced and not appreciated by the world that has seemingly turned against them. It’s the essence of what is often dismissively termed “dad cinema.” 

Therefore, what I think David Ayer’s most recent movie A Working Man does and whether or not it succeeds on any appreciable level must be filtered through this simple heuristic. It’s a movie most likely to resonate with men, if it is to resonate with anyone at all. And only within the parameters of entertainment specifically targeting a sub-demographic of male viewership who are either too old or too checked-out to feel entertained by the shlock coming out of the Mouse House firehose one can begin to place this movie. Otherwise, it’s almost too easy to pick apart and if you chose to do so, no amount of mental gymnastics and disbelief suspension would be enough to counterbalance a factual, logic-based takedown of this movie as a work of stupendously incoherent genre filmmaking. To enjoy A Working Man a willingness of the heart is required. 

Because, let’s be honest, Ayer who directed it and co-wrote the screenplay together with Sylvester Stallone aren’t even trying to pretend their movie belongs on the same shelf with other retrieve-a-kidnapped-wife/daughter/niece/friend/neighbour/stranger wish fulfilment fantasies that either attempt at grit or realism (Taken, Man on Fire or Prisoners) or bet their house on the spectacle (Commando). It’s a B-movie through-and-through, which isn’t all that surprising if you take a long hard look at the kind of movies David Ayer has been making all throughout his career. Having cut his teeth on police procedurals and gangster pics like Street Kings, Harsh Times and Sabotage, all of which would have fit perfectly on that middle shelf in your local video store in the mid-90s, he ventured into the realm of hyper-stylized, over-saturated post-MTV cacophony, which began subtly with adding coloured tracer fire to an otherwise grounded Fury and landed him with the clearly Joel Schumacher-inspired Suicide Squad. Even his latest effort The Beekeeper is best described as Joel Schumacher’s John Wick to those who are willing to give it its day in court.  

That’s where we are in A Working Man, a movie that overtly operates using quick and digestible visual cliché, neon-washed sets that could trick you into thinking they are here to homage those lush locations you remember from John Wick: Chapter 4 while they are more at home as distant progeny of Batman & Robin, and simple, sparse and to-the-point character-based writing Stallone employed in The Expendables series or Homefront, another Statham vehicle. It’s honestly a fool’s errand to look for grounded in logic hard-and-fast realism of Ayer’s early outings because had this movie been made twenty or thirty years ago, it would have been a Stone Cold Steve Austin or a Lorenzo Lamas movie aspiring to nothing more than base-level entertainment.  

Thus, I don’t seriously fault A Working Man for its gaudy opening credits sequence, nor do I scoff at the fact that Jason Statham (who I can only hope has now become an Ayer stalwart) shows up for work at a construction site to give his co-workers a pep talk in the style of Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday. I also don’t object to the fact the filmmakers feel obliged to inform me five minutes into the movie that he means business, kicks ass on company time and threatens mobster goons with a shotgun at his workplace. That’s just to give me advance notice of how I need to attune myself to what’s to come.  

And that “what’s to come”, my dear reader, is just a cacophonous medley of genre tropes, telegraphed world-building and surface-level character work that any self-respecting critic is likely to reject on principle. Luckily, I don’t see myself as a critic and my self-respect in this field has been out to lunch ever since I decided to champion Frank Marshall’s Congo as a piece of misunderstood camp entertainment and Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact as the 1998 asteroid movie to watch instead of Michael Bay’s Armageddon. These opinions of mine are old enough now to have kids of their own. 

Therefore, I think I’m qualified enough to understand that what Ayer’s A Working Man is trying to do is not to be set against the backdrop of everything else that’s out there right now. This is not a movie that belongs in the current zeitgeist, but rather one that tries to resurrect the memory of the era we buried in the backyard long ago. It’s brash, stupid, loud and incoherent, but that’s what makes it an interesting specimen to experience, because with a few exceptions, there is very little out there like it. Again, this is where a cynical type heckles me by shouting “Good!” from the back rows, because there is perhaps very little appetite among the general public to indulge in the kind of entertainment where Jason Statham takes out the Russian organized crime, cavorts with drug dealers who have built themselves biker-inspired Iron Thrones in night clubs and walks around town while speaking very little and somehow getting everyone to understand where he’s coming from, all the while a flurry of violence unfolds with squibs, broken appendages, occasional one-liners and brief bouts of schmaltz courtesy of the score that kicks in exactly where you expect it to do so, all washed in luscious neon. 

Consequently, as someone who has done his homework and successfully attuned himself to what this movie is likely to be like within the first five minutes, I see A Working Man as a beautifully messy piece of genre schlock that is best described as an attempt at answering the question nobody ever asked: what do you think would happen if Joel Schumacher or Rob Zombie ever decided to remake Taken? It’s clearly a movie that doesn’t take place in any tangible reality, much closer in spirit to the hyper-stylized comic book movies of the mid-90s than to what we currently understand as the mainstream of genre entertainment. The Moon in external shots is so large I can only expect the tides to compete in severity with the ones on that planet orbiting a black hole in Interstellar and the baddies Statham must dispatch while trying to save his boss’s (Michael Peña) teenage daughter (Arianna Rivas) look preposterous enough to feel at home in Johnny Mnemonic rather than anything else. In fact, if you added the psychedelic tone, retained most of the aesthetic and gave it a sedative, you might be close enough to  seeing this movie as related to the Panos Cosmatos-directed Mandy.  

It’s just the kind of fun you have to acclimate yourself to, but I find it nonetheless fulfilling… because, as I have remarked already, filmmakers who get to spend forty million dollars on a movie like this are an endangered species. Thus, I choose to recommend A Working Man as a what-if-Rob-Zombie-remade-Commando and a what if Joel Schumacher chose to make Taken in the style of Batman Forever. It’s an experiment in midrange video store base-level entertainment that’s too good to be dumped unceremoniously on Amazon Prime after a few lean weeks in cinemas, while it is also nowhere near as polished and well-conceptualized to be recommended to twenty-somethings who see John Wick as the second coming of Jesus Christ himself.  

Call it a cop-out and a complete non-recommendation but A Working Man is the kind of trash I like, a visually vibrant and completely lobotomized piece of wish fulfilment fantasy that I can re-watch without a shred of guilt because it demands very little and offers me a trip to places other filmmakers don’t know exist. And I’m totally fine with the notion of being the only idiot on this planet brave enough to see it as a distant descendant of Hardcore and Man on Fire because, while miles away from Paul Schrader and Tony Scott, Ayer seems to have what it takes to borrow and homage just about enough to keep his work within the scope of the legacy of this ancient storytelling archetype, while he twists and embellishes it so much that it looks like a product of mid-90s schlock fantasy rather than anything built to make serious money.