Film reviews: A Working Man | Novocaine | The End

A Working Man (15) ★★☆☆☆

Novocaine (15) ★★☆☆☆

The End (12A) ★★★☆☆

Ten years on from his hilarious supporting role in the action-comedy Spy, Jason Statham has yet to find a comparably entertaining vehicle for his particular brand of hard-punching action mayhem. Sadly, A Working Man is yet another dud. Like last year’s cheap-looking The Beekeeper, it finds Statham re-teaming with director David Ayer for a film that could have been lean, mean revenge movie, but soon gets bogged down in tedious criminal conspiracy subplots involving the Russian mafia (Ayer is certainly a long way from his drum-tight Training Day script).

It doesn’t help that the film creates a certain amount of geographical confusion about its setting. After the credits establish Statham’s Levon Cade as an ex-British soldier, the film opens with him working as a foreman on a London building site. That it’s supposed to be in Chicago is something that only becomes apparent many scenes later with some close-ups of cars with Illinois number plates.

Jason Statham as Levon Cade in A Working Man | © 2025 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Rubbish production design aside, the film demonstrates Levon’s handiness with a sledgehammer when some gun-toting goons show up to harass one of his construction workers, a scene that has nothing to do with anything other than establishing the character’s combat training so that when his boss’ grown-up daughter is coincidentally kidnapped later that night, we know her father (played by Michael Peña) will give him a bagful of cash to track her down.

Not that there’s any urgency on this front. Where Taken saw Liam Neeson hop on the first plane to Paris to rescue his daughter, the parents in this movie wait the whole weekend before asking Levon to put his particular set of skills to use. That’s indicative of the slack plotting overall. We don’t, for instance, find out that the woman (played by Arianna Rivas) has been trafficked-to-order until close to the end, a development that could have given the film some of Taken’s propulsive energy, but instead ends up feeling like an afterthought, a way to tie up the meandering plot after spending close to two hours following Levon as he exacts sadistic revenge on a series of increasingly flamboyant Russian mobsters.

Produced and co-written by Sylvester Stallone, A Working Man has the feel of a late-period, straight-to-streaming Stallone film. The general air of that’ll-do complacency makes Statham similarly look like an also-ran.

Novocaine | Contributed

If things are looking grim for the action movie in the hands of veterans like Statham and Ayer, Novocaine suggests the genre’s in no better shape with a younger generation. Taking a fun premise and pushing it too far in the wrong direction, it stars Jack Quaid as a Nate Caine, a shy assistant bank manager whose inability to feel pain on account of a rare genetic condition forces him to proceed through life with extreme caution to avoid inadvertently maiming himself. That starts to change when new employee Sherry (played by Prey’s Amber Midthunder) takes a shine to Nate and encourages him to take a few more risks in life, something directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen use to bait audiences into thinking they’re watching a corny, tongue-in-cheek rom-com.

The inevitable rug-pull comes when a gang of vicious bank robbers take Sherry hostage, setting in motion a hyper-violent, heightened action romp as Nate is suddenly forced to throw caution to the wind and take advantage of his super-power-like pain threshold if he’s to have any hope of rescuing her. The problem, though, is the filmmakers’ insouciant attitude towards violence results in something so grim and nihilistic it ruins the joke. It’s one thing to put your hero through the gory slapstick ringer by treating him like Wile E Coyote or Bruce Campbell in the Evil Dead movies (to be fair, Quaid does get some laughs); it’s quite another to show characters graphically slaughtering innocent bystanders at every turn while still expecting us to root for those partially responsible. Back to the drawing board guys.

In his form-challenging documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer used performance as a tool to unlock the moral misgivings of real-life murderers living in the bubble of their own collective denial. In his first fiction film, an apocalyptic parable entitled The End, he applies a similar strategy, using a musical to psychologically unravel the well-to-do inhabitants of an underground bunker who can’t quite confront their own culpability in causing the devastating environmental catastrophe raging above ground.

It’s an intriguing approach and the cast (led by Tilda Swinton, George McKay and Michael Shannon) embrace the concept thoroughly, using the songs to tease out layers of subtext in their characters’ often banal interactions with each other. Alas, the heavily ironised songs — by Oppenheimer and composer Josh Schmidt — lack the requisite razzle-dazzle to really make the concept work. They’re too downbeat, which makes them — and the film — too on-the-nose to really force us to interrogate the cognitive dissonance required to watch entertainment about humanity’s demise.

All films in cinemas from 28 March