At The Movies: Jason Statham gets job done in A Working Man, noir thriller Holland lacks payoff

A Working Man (M18)

116 minutes, opens on March 27
★★★☆☆

The story: Chicago construction worker Levon Cade (Jason Statham) sets out to rescue his boss’ kidnapped daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) and uncovers a vast conspiracy of corruption.

Levon’s Linkedln listing in A Working Man is immaterial. The American writer-director of this B-movie is David Ayer of The Beekeeper (2024), and whether a beekeeper, a car dealer (The Bank Job, 2008) or an armoured truck driver (Wrath Of Man, 2021), the only character Statham plays is a mysterious loner hiding from a violent past he is forced to return to.

The predictability is the point. The 57-year-old Brit, with his blend of physicality and glowering charisma, is Hollywood’s most dependable action star. He knows what you came for. Nothing he can do about the slapdash plot adapted from Chuck Dixon’s 2014 novel Levon’s Trade, but he will ensure you the primitive satisfaction of seeing him punch, shoot, maim and perform martial arts for righteous justice.

Levon is also good at waterboarding, a credit to his two decades with the Royal Marines Commandos.

The troubled widowed veteran has lost custody of his daughter (Isla Gie). Teen abductee Jenny and her loving Mexican parents (Michael Pena and Noemi Gonzalez) are now his family, hence his resolve in finding her by killing his way up the ranks of a Russian human trafficking syndicate that has Jason Flemyng as a deliriously flamboyant mafioso and the local police on its payroll.

Jenny does not just meekly wait around for him. She head-scissors her captors in gutsy escape attempts, and impresses too for her sensitive Beethoven piano recital in her cell.

No one even pretends to take any of this seriously, and neither should you.

Hot take: The Stath continues his brand of low-brow entertainment while making the world a safer place.

Holland (M18)

108 minutes, premieres on Amazon Prime on March 27
★★☆☆☆

The story: Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman) is a home economics teacher in the quaint lakeside hamlet of Holland, Michigan. Her picture-perfect life with a young son (Jude Hill) and an optometrist husband (Matthew Macfadyen) is upended when she suspects the latter of an extramarital affair.

Why is Holland set in a faux-European burg with tulips and windmills? And why in the year 2000? The American noir thriller is full of bizarre creative choices that have no payoff.

Another would be the introduction of Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal as the sole immigrant in the white Midwestern community. He plays Dave Delgado, the colleague Nancy enlists to help investigate the infidelity: An isolated incident of bigotry aside, the two amateur sleuths simply go about their shenanigans of breaking into the husband’s office and stalking him on his “business trips”.

They also begin an affair of their own.

In director Mimi Cave’s debut feature, the 2022 indie horror Fresh, the heroine discovered her date was a cannibal.

Cave is a stylish enough film-maker to keep the audience watching, waiting for some comparable twist in her sophomore movie. Star-cum-producer Kidman, all porcelain-doll primness, gaily sends up the image of the repressed housewife, while Polish cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski’s (Hereditary, 2018; Midsommar, 2019) paranoid dream sequences hint at Nancy’s destabilised psyche.

The macabre secret eventually uncovered may well be her imagination, her escape from banality and boredom. Or there could indeed exist evil and darkness beneath the small-town idyll. Either way, the floundering plot inspires indifference rather than intrigue.

Hot take: This satire of suburban nightmare is more like a nap, lacking purpose and tension.