A Working Man (15, 116 mins)
Verdict: Violent and formulaic
Jason Statham, in A Working Man, plays a sheepish antiquarian bookseller who has shied away from confrontation his whole life.
Oh alright, that’s a lie. I just wanted to see what it might look like on the page. In fact, he plays a hard-nut ex-commando who is persuaded out of retirement when some nasty people kidnap his employer’s daughter.
At first he half-heartedly protests that his days of hunting down bad guys and stabbing them in the neck with screwdrivers are behind him. ‘I’m a different person now,’ he grunts, with a faraway look in his steely eye. ‘It’s not who I am any more,’ he adds, convincing nobody, least of all the audience.
Very soon, as you have surely guessed, he is back slashing throats and breaking heads, a one-man killing machine.
This granite-jawed alpha-male is called Levon Cade, a daft name straight out of a trashy novel, or in this case a 2014 novel entitled Levon’s Trade, by one Chuck Dixon. I don’t know whether it’s trashy because I haven’t read it. But I’ve seen this film, or slight variations of it, a thousand times.
A Working Man, directed by David Ayer, is co-written by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone. They’re a pair of old pros who know that no matter how many baddies their hero liquidates, for the audience to empathise with him he needs a soft side.
So Cade has a school-age daughter he loves more than life itself, even though he has lost custody of her to his sneering millionaire father-in-law.
And if that’s not soft enough for you, he can also identify Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. If you cross him he’ll batter your eyeballs out, but he knows his classical music.
Cade runs a construction site in Chicago but sounds like he grew up in Great Yarmouth. Nobody in the entire course of the movie so much as raises an eyebrow at his Limey accent, but that may be because they’re too busy trying to kill him, and would, if only they could shoot straight.
In any case, they all have accents too. The abduction of Jenny (Arianna Rivas), the daughter of Cade’s employer, turns out to involve psychopathic Russian gangsters, who insist on speaking broken English to one another except when they get extremely emotional. Only then do they lapse, one senses grudgingly, into their native tongue.
All this is as formulaic as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, only not nearly as clever. That said, it’s fun to watch Jason Flemyng hamming it up heroically as a wife-beating Russian Mob boss, and at least he has more acting to do than poor Michael Pena, who as the abducted girl’s father does hardly anything except weep.
Last year, you’ll recall, Statham starred in a ridiculous film called The Beekeeper, in which he played a retired special forces soldier who abandoned his apiary to go on a righteous killing spree.
That, too, was directed by Ayer who, I like to think, will one day offer Statham another hard-as-nails role as an ex-soldier lured back into combat, only to be met with an unyielding: ‘I’m a different person now. That’s not who I am any more.’
We can only hope.
Novocaine (15, 110 mins)
Verdict: Pretty painful
While A Working Man is about as original as a traffic cone, Novocaine gets off to an intriguing start, with the promise of something a bit different.
Jack Quaid plays Nate Caine, mild-mannered assistant manager at a bank in San Diego, who on an awkward first date with Sherry (Amber Midthunder), a colleague he fancies, admits that he has a congenital condition which makes him immune to pain.
Far from being useful, this has blighted his life. As a kid he was bullied by boys who nicknamed him ‘Novocaine’, and neurotically sheltered by his parents, who were terrified he might bleed to death without even knowing he was hurt.
As an adult he is a loner, his only friend a fellow video-gamer (Jacob Batalon), not that they’ve ever laid eyes on each other.
But Nate’s condition suddenly becomes handy when his bank is violently robbed, and the murderous robbers take Sherry with them as a hostage. Nervously, he sets off in pursuit and gets into all sorts of alarming scrapes.
This is fun for a while, until you realise co-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen really have only one card to play: Nate must keep doing stuff that makes us wince with imagined pain, and it must get nastier to stop us getting bored. So the film mutates into a kind of torture comedy, getting steadily less funny.
On the upside, there’s a neat mid-way twist that I didn’t see coming, and Quaid (son of Dennis) is a fine comic actor – as engaging in his way as his mother Meg Ryan. Not that she’d get involved in anything as gruesome as this, unless you can somehow picture When Harry Waterboarded Sally.
Both films are in cinemas now.
Also Showing
By Larushka Ivan-Zadeh
Holland (18, 110 mins)
Prepare for movie deja vu with Holland, a lush-looking thriller starring Nicole Kidman as yet another hot, control-freak blonde whose perfect life hides a dark secret.
Set in the town of Holland, Michigan, it sees Kidman’s desperate housewife turn amateur sleuth when she suspects her optometrist husband (Matthew Macfadyen) of gaslighting her.
Is he having an affair? Or is it all in her head? Visually, director Mimi Cave wows with her kitschy, David Lynch-esqe surrealism.
Sadly, the plotting is bizarrely haphazard. Kidman gives it her mighty all, supported by solid work from Jude Hill (the boy from Belfast) and Gael Garcia Bernal. But a botched third act means no one comes out of Holland smelling of tulips.
Streaming now on Prime.
The Woman In The Yard (15, 98 mins)
This is a psychological horror film which, at under an hour and a half, is well worth the price of cinema admission, if you like this sort of thing.
Danielle Deadwyler, so terrific as a bereaved mother in Till (2022), again shows her class as a woman, Ramona, who is overwhelmed by physical, financial and emotional challenges following the death of her husband in a road accident.
Ramona and her two children live in a ramshackle farmhouse where one day they get a visit from a sinister woman draped in black, who sits in the front yard and refuses to leave.
Gradually we realise who she might be and what she means when she tells them, creepily: ‘Today’s the day.’
The director is Jaume Collet-Sera, best-known for action thrillers, but he started out making horror films and this is a worthwhile return to the genre. And it never outstays its welcome.
The End (12A, 148 mins)
By Brian Viner
I wish I could say the same for The End, which makes wishful thinking of its own title, despite an impressive cast including Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay and Tim McInerny.
Like (the overrated) Emilia Perez, The End makes an offbeat musical out of an unusual premise. In this case, a wealthy family has survived a global apocalypse and now lives in a luxurious underground bunker.
It can’t be faulted for ambition, but it’s a bloated and self-indulgent exercise on the part of writer-director Joshua Oppenheimer.
