Jason Statham is back on our cinema screens with ‘A Working Man’, and you guessed it; this isn’t a sensitive “art-house” release.

• Raised by small-town showbiz parents in Derbyshire, England, Jason Statham has risen to the ranks of Hollywood’s A-list action actors.
• The screenplay, inspired by Chuck Dixon’s Levon Cade series of novels, was written by Sylvester Stallone.
• Catch Tat Wolfen’s entertainment commentary on The Sandton Times Hour, every Monday at 7pm on 91.9FM.
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So, what’s the plotline of ‘A Working Man’? Easy: Jason Statham plays Levon Cade, a hardened military veteran who’s working for a construction company that’s headed up by a wealthy businessman of Mexican heritage (played by Michael Peña). When the boss-guy’s daughter is kidnapped, Levon sets off to make things right again. Cue a breath-taking body count such as probably has never been seen on-screen before. And the viewer is spared none of the gory details.

And that’s it, folks; it’s what the target audience wants, and what the target audience will get. No nuance, and no intricate sub-plots, apart from the side-story of Levon only having limited access to his young daughter, because he’s such a potentially dangerous man. The ‘basically-good-but-hard-done-by-divorced-dad’: a movie cliché if ever I saw one, as much as I know that this happens in the real world.

Jason Statham was never my favourite “actor” – and I use the term loosely. His monosyllabic mutterings and immobile mug used to get squarely on my last working nerve. Lately, however, I’ve made peace with his persona. At least his movies have a moral core, albeit one festooned with blood and guts. In this movie, the bad guys are human traffickers, so we have the satisfaction that punishment couldn’t be meted to a more deserving mob. We’ve all seen how, in horror movies, the bad guy always seems to get up again. Well, in this movie, the bad guys are so ferociously sliced-and-diced that there’s no way – even in the fictional realm – that they’re coming back for more.

Who woulda thunk that, after the Cold War years, during which the Hollywood villains of choice were Russians, we’d be back on that beat again, with the baddies being Russians mafiosi (and all sporting dreadful accents, that don’t seem to belong to any real-world country). Amongst them, incidentally, is the ex-South African actor/comedian, Cokey Falkow.

Part of my reason for growing less judgemental, of late, of Jason Statham’s one-note performances, is that I must acknowledge that he’s become a contemporary link in what’s becoming a chain of legacy cinematic ass-kickers, from Charles Bronson (another stranger to facial expressions) to Liam Neeson. Of course, many younger folk wouldn’t know that Liam Neeson actually made his chops as an “art-house” actor. Once the first ‘Taken’ took off, however, all his fine earlier work dissolved in the fickle steam of popular culture. It was indeed interesting, for those of us with longer memories, to have the tough avenger played by an established “sensitive guy”. But now, with Jason Statham, we’re back to the tough guy who was never anything but that. ‘A Working Man’ is directed by David Ayer, who worked with Jason Statham on the recent ‘The Beekeeper’, so one would imagine that they’re quite well synced by now.

These kinds of movies tend to be well received at the box office, and living as we do in a crime-ridden country, I suspect that South Africans audiences will be snapping up tickets at speed. On a side note, the preview audience with whom I saw the movie actually broke out in applause, more than once. There’s an undeniably cathartic element to the revenge genre, as we love seeing justice being done. Even if it’s only at the movies.

Tat Wolfen is a multimedia communicator, entertainment commentator and leisure journalist. Tune in for Tat’s razor-sharp takes on the latest on stage and screen, every week on The Sandton Times Hour – Mondays at 7pm on 91.9FM or on a fine selection of the world’s leading podcast platforms. [Disclaimer: Views expressed by reviewers/contributors are their own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Sandton Times and its ownership or management.]

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