Co-written by Sylvester Stallone, ‘A Working Man’ recycles from Jason Statham’s previous film, ‘The Beekeeper’, in terms of giving us a conscientious, hard-working man who is forced to tap into his buried military background in order to save the life of someone he is honour-bound to protect. At the same time, it is a ‘Rambo’-like saviour narrative in which a man goes deep into the (metaphorical) jungle in order to reclaim someone missing, when the authorities are too powerless or corrupt, or both, to take on the responsibility themselves.

We have seen all the tropes before – the brutish and misunderstood but decent loner who shows great respect to those who treat him and his compatriots well but will exercise great wrath and vengeance upon those who cross him. His life in hibernation is put to the test when the daughter of his construction site manager is kidnapped and sold to a human trafficker, and he uses every trick in the book to rescue her and bring her home. And, being a man of his word, we know that Statham will stop at nothing to make good on his promise.

This is the sort of movie Liam Neeson could easily have played – the nods to ‘Taken’ are exacerbated by us being given two daughters, one of whom is the protagonist’s daughter, who must be protected at all costs, in this violent ode to the sanctity of family. While the labyrinthine script veers into complex territory, it is a straightforward good vs. evil story, where the good characters are hard-ass but upright and the bad guys don’t even try to mask their penchant for sadistic cruelty. The title ‘A Working Man’ makes sense in the context of Statham’s work in the construction industry, but it is very early into the film that his presence here is abandoned, and he becomes a full time combat figure who uses his special ops training to waterboard, drown, shoot and stab his adversaries.

In the opening credits, all the names above the title were male, but this film does have significant roles for women, and even the young woman being saved is no damsel-in-distress who is more than capable of holding her own against the traffickers who are holding her captive. The formula here is far from new – it feels like a variation on what George C. Scott did in Paul Schrader’s ‘Hardcore’ and Nicolas Cage undertook in ‘8mm’ mixed with traces of the private investigation drama along the lines of Elliott Gould’s decent but dour anti-hero in Robert Altman’s ‘The Long Goodbye’ – but it is given a new incarnation in the form of Statham’s hard core, gun-toting man of resilience.