A Super Team of Clichés Assemble in Trailer for Jason Statham’s A Working Man
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a trailer cobbled together almost exclusively from genre clichés, but leave it to Jason Statham and David Ayer to one-up their previous efforts in last year’s The Beekeeper. The two are teaming up again for another film in the ever-popular “blue collar white guy is a secret badass who will save exploited young women” action genre, and today we have an eye-rolling first trailer for that film, the creatively titled A Working Man. Because you see, it’s about a guy who works for a living. A guy played by Jason Statham, who also knows 1,000 ways to kill a man. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.
A Working Man does actually have one other wrinkle of oddity to it, though: It can boast a screenplay by Ayer and … Sylvester Stallone? Why or how Stallone is involved in this particular potboiler isn’t exactly clear, but it’s his first writing credit since effectively coming out of writer’s retirement for co-credit on 2019’s Rambo: Last Blood. We’re pleased to be able to say that he’s even added another illustrious Action Guy name to the incredible menagerie that Statham’s characters have possessed over the years: This time he’s called “Levon Cade.” Our official synopsis is below:
Levon Cade, an ex-black ops agent, leads a peaceful life with his daughter as a construction worker. However, Levon is forced to use his old set of skills to find his boss’s teenage daughter and soon uncovers a criminal conspiracy that has the potential to wreak havoc on Levon’s peaceful life.
So it’s a blue collar Taken, pretty much. The trailer below looks like it will play spectacularly well to the QAnon-adjacent, right-wing cinema consumers out there in particular, with its talk of shadowy “elites” and corrupt government officials all being involved in a sinister human trafficking–because it’s always human trafficking–ring of some kind. Bonus points if A Working Man manages to somehow cash in on the new wave of Trump-inspired immigrant hysteria as well. You can enjoy the way too long, seen-the-whole-movie trailer below, peppered with every common action cliché and the requisite slowed-down version of a classic song, in this case Buffalo Springfield’s iconic “For What It’s Worth.”
A Working Man humbly punches the clock in U.S. theaters on March 28, 2025.