drjacobgrayson

The first hour is just two guys starting up a bar. I'm not sure why this takes literally half the movie. We just slowly amble around the town meeting the different main characters. The second hour is just standard vampire stuff, except with mostly black people instead of pasty white people. There's unresolved black white racism stuff. There's sporadic music and singing. It's like one writer made a vampire movie, another writer made a deep south black period piece, and a third writer wanted to make a musical, and then in the end they just mashed it all together to create one 2hr mess. Why exactly is everyone raving about this movie?

Jason Statham plays the same character that he does in every other one of his movies, of course, but A Working Man is more of a Steven Seagal-like straight-to-video effort, i.e. An extra dumb plot, big plot holes, cartoonish characters, over-the-top acting, and of course Statham has to say things like "I don't want any trouble" before beating the crap out of everyone. I could probably write a book about all the dumb things that are said in this movie, but I'll just give one: When a mother's daughter is kidnapped by a Russian crime mob, the police tell her "they don't pursue these cases." Ok well, I guess vigilante justice is our only option then.

This movie is shot entirely from a single handheld camera within a house, which gives it a definite "college film class" vibe. Everyone is overacting like they think they're in a play rather than a movie, and the "family" just doesn't seem to know each other very well, it's like they just met on the movie set a few days ago. There are little subplots that are never fully realized, the purpose of which it turns out is just to try to extend this into a full length movie (84 min). This very well could have been a 15-minute short film on YouTube, and it would have been okay but still not great. I'm surprised Lucy Liu doesn't have some better opportunities.