Jason Statham’s last movie, The Beekeeper, featured a villain who was the President’s corrupt son engaging in business grifting and fraud while blowing his loot on drugs and hookers. Statham’s character, “Adam Clay,” was a ruthless, pitiless golem activated to take down the bad guys, no matter how connected. Now that Joe and Hunter Biden are out of office, Statham picks a new theme to offer up cinematic MAGA fare: sex trafficking by violent criminal immigrants.
Working Man steals its plot from Liam Neeson’s movies where he has “very special skills.” The writers include Sylvester Stallone and some of those behind The Beekeeper, but the story’s about a girl who’s been “taken,” and is auctioned off as a sex toy, just not to a Saudi prince. And the girl isn’t Statham’s daughter, but that of old friends. Who know that friend Levon Cade was previously much more dangerous than the Chicago-land construction site manager he is now. (“Levon” by the way is Armenian for “lion,” and “Cade” is Brittonic for “battle.”)
A twist for the MAGA audience: the girl is Carla Garcia, an Hispanic-American. And the criminals who’ve taken—harvested—her are the palest Russians we’ve ever seen, who’ve ended up in Illinois. The Russian mafia doesn’t kidnap girls and traffic them; they’re organized and have councils, a hierarchy and enforcers who make sure none of their own threaten the enterprise.
But like the Bidens, the Russians have a bad son, who runs his operation out of a rural roadhouse in the countryside near Joliet, Illinois. His crew snap photos of hot girls in Chicago clubs, and then offer to roofie or chloroform, kidnap and deliver them to wealthy perverts. Pay, prey and play.
The son’s played by tall, masculine Maximilian Osinski, an actor who plays soccer star Zava on Ted Lasso. But you won’t recognize him. Here he’s a long-haired, makeup- and earring-wearing, Eurotrash metrosexual, clothed in Liberace outfits. Weirdly, he’s the spitting image of the long-haired metrosexual vampire Amilyn that Paul Reubens played in the 1992 movie Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. And the Russian mafia members are all so pale and Goth that they look like vampires. The Joliet roadhouse looks like a creepy witch’s house. The people behind Working Man were desperate to make the victim a girl of color, and the villains so white that they couldn’t even be normal mortal white people. (In Beekeeper Statham is seeking vengeance for the death of his close friend and neighbor played by Claire Huxtable, Phylicia Rashad.) The result is a very weird film that makes you wonder about the choices made in making it, even as you may enjoy the somewhat successful production of Taken 4.