Jason Statham faces his most daunting opponent yet in his new action thriller, A Working Man: the wardrobe department.
NB: The following contains spoilers for A Working Man.
The things we see in movies are seldom placed there by accident. From the specific positioning of a light to the books on a protagonist’s shelf, even the smallest details are generally by design rather than happenstance. Which helps explain some of the more outlandish wardrobe choices in A Working Man, the latest opus from Jason Statham.
In action terms, A Working Man has quite a pedigree behind it. It’s the second collaboration between Statham and director David Ayer; their previous film was 2024’s silly, deliriously enjoyable outing, The Beekeeper. Their latest creative pairing is based on a script by Sylvester Stallone, adapted from the 2014 novel Levon’s Trade by Chuck Dixon.
Unfortunately, despite all the commonalities between the two – including the use of British locations as stand-ins for parts of the USA – A Working Man doesn’t scale the entertaining heights of The Beekeeper. It’s a fairly meat-and-potatoes action flick, albeit with some genuinely intriguing clothing choices, courtesy of costume designer Tiziana Corvisieri.
This being another entry in the occupation-based thriller genre, Statham plays Levon Cade, a former British commando turned construction worker. Battle-weary and down on his luck, Levon is prodded back into action one day when his boss’s daughter, Jenny (Ariana Rivas) is kidnapped by Russian gangsters. With the help of his partially-sighted war vet Gunny (David Harbour), who provides the weapons and sage advice, Levon sets out to menace and murder his way to the young woman’s location.
From A Working Man’s opening scenes, Ayer and his collaborators make insistent use of clothing to tell us something about their characters’ attitudes. Levon, understandably, favours utilitarian get-ups in black, dark blue and gray – the sorts of trousers and jackets that have lots of pockets. This is contrasted by one of the first antagonistic characters we meet: Dr Roth (Richard Heap), Levon’s father-in-law and the grandfather of his whimsically-named daughter, Merry.
A psychologist, Roth is upper-class, verbose and pompous. The film underlines this by introducing him at an Alice In Wonderland-themed garden party – complete with powdered wigs, animals (was that an alpaca walking past…?) and gigantic playing cards.
It’s a plot point added, seemingly, so that the wardrobe department can clothe the doctor in the most flamboyant, effete costume possible. Presumably, he’s meant to be playing the part of the Mad Hatter, but he looks more like the chap from Jamiroquai.
Dr Roth’s sartorial choices look positively restrained, however, compared to Danya and Vanko – a pair of doltish gangsters whose baroque jumpsuits, with matching hats, make them look like the central characters in the 2000 comedy spin-off, Kevin And Perry Go Large. Their threads are so garish that Levon can’t help but comment on them in the midst of a tense scene in the back of a van; “It’s couture,” one of them says, rather defensively. “It’s our fucking brand, man!”
Levon subsequently encounters Dimi (Maximilian Osinski), a drug dealer who holds some key information about the kidnapped daughter. With his luxuriant long hair, chunky rings and silk shirts, Dimi’s clothing choices actually become more flamboyant as the film progresses; there’s a scene in a club later on where his outfit’s so Rococco, so devastatingly fancy – lace neck collar, sleeve ruffs, pink aristo hat, complete with ostrich feather – that he makes the Laughing Cavalier look positively dowdy.
This is, perhaps, the point A Working Man is trying to make. In this universe, the foppish gangsters are the new aristocracy – a class of people so far above the law that they’ve largely become disconnected from the criminal enterprises they oversee. Jason Statham’s character, perhaps a stand-in for hard-grafting average joes everywhere, is a tough guy with dirt under his fingernails, and able to move with ease through the assorted dive bars where drugs are bought and sold.
It’s telling that, of all the villains in A Working Man, it’s the muscle-bound drug runner Dougie (Cokey Falkow) who is given respect. With his homemade throne adorned with exhaust mufflers and skulls, Dougie may look like a refugee from Mad Max, but he’s an ex-soldier himself, so there’s a palpable sense of mutual recognition between him and Levon. The pair even share a conciliatory remark or two before Dougie’s sent to meet his maker.
A Working Man also draws a distinction between the older Russian gangsters and their young progeny. The veteran set, exemplified by Wolodymyr (Jason Flemyng) and in particular Symon (Andrej Kaminsky) – who looks like he’s wandered in from a Hammer horror movie – favour the suits and long coats more typically seen in classic gangster films.
It’s a marked contrast to the likes of Danya and Vanko, who swagger around looking like the upper-crust lot in The Hunger Games, or a pair of assassins, Dutch and Nestor, who look like something from the early 2000s nu-metal era.
The Beekeeper drew a similar contrast in its costume design. Its Boomer villains, such as Jeremy Irons’ Wallace Westwyld, favoured buttoned-down conservatism – all starched collars and crisp tailoring. The younger antagonists, including Josh Hutcherson‘s bratty tech bro Derek, were more into louder ‘street’ wear; meanwhile, a small army of goons brought in to fight Statham later in the film looked like something out of 90s anime. Gelled hair, bright yellow jackets and elaborate tattoos were the order of the day there.
It’s possible to detect a hint of ‘tsk, kids today’ generational war in The Beekeeper and A Working Man: an assumption – perhaps a correct one – that the viewers of Statham’s output are in their 40s and 50s, and might delight in seeing their hero despatch a bunch of feckless youths in their dandyish garb.
This would explain why Statham reserves some of his more withering beat-downs for his least capable opponents. Dimi is shot in the hand, shoved arse-first into a muddy puddle and blasted in the chest. Kevin and Perry – sorry, Danya and Vanko – are beaten, strangled and shot to death in the back of a van. Statham then boots said van into a river. Not only are they killed, but their clothes are also left soaking wet and ruined. It’s about sending a message.
The generational warfare theory only falls apart somewhat when we come to Mr Broward (Kenneth Collard), the weaselly multi-millionaire who’d had Jenny kidnapped in the first place. Squeaky-voiced and first seen wearing a silken smoking jacket, he shows up again in the third act wearing a top hat, dinner suit and chewing on a cigarette holder, like a combination of a Batman villain and the bloke off the Monopoly box.
When Mr Broward finally gets his bloody comeuppance, the implication seems to be that it’s not just sex trafficking that’s a mortal sin, but his appalling dress sense.
Dandies, fops and rakish toffs of the world be warned: Statham could come for you next.
A Working Man is streaming now on Prime Video.
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