You can see the reasoning behind a movie like A Working Man. It’s based on a series of popular novels by Chuck Dixon, and it looks like a spiritual sequel to 2024’s The Beekeeper, with the same director and star and roughly the same formula of bad man comes out of retirement to enact extreme vengeance on bad people. While The Beekeeper was entertaining mostly for its incredulity and becoming a self-parody of these kinds of loner action vehicles, A Working Man just feels like any other mediocre genre entry that populates the realm of lower-budget direct-to-streaming action. Jason Statham stars once again as a man of the people, a construction foreman, who also happens to be an ex-Royal Marine. The daughter of a friend is abducted for sex trafficking, or taken if you will, and Statham has to use his particular set of skills to crush some skulls and save the girl. I’m struggling to remember much of this movie because there’s nothing that truly stands out. It goes about its business with a pre-programmed utility, delivering Statham to a new bad guy every ten minutes or so as he works his way up the scuzzy ladder of bad men in bad suits. I guess that might be something memorable, one of the bad guys has an exquisitely bad suit, enough that others even question and comment. There aren’t any memorable villains or exchanges or even action sequences. It’s all so rote and mechanical and so easily forgettable. There’s nothing here worth spending almost two hours for, and there’s certainly little here to get anyone excited for a possible franchise of Statham being a faux working man striking back for the little guy.

Nate’s Grade: C