An Action Movie? In This Political Climate?

It’s hard to find a good bad-guy movie lately.

In olden times, like last year for example, there were certain cinematic tropes that could consistently be relied upon. But the political incoherence of recent months has muddied the waters for American action films like A Working Man, a new action thriller co-written by director David Ayer and actor Sylvester Stallone.

A Working Man hails from the same team that brought last year’s The Beekeeper into bee-ing.

A gonzo addition to the action genre, The Beekeeper featured resident baldie badass Jason Statham doing what he does best.

As ex-military something or other in the film, Statham tended bees and broke people’s knees. Actually, it was a lot more than knees — just about anything that could be busted up on a human body was so. Cutting a swath through a hive of evil phone scammers presided over by an evil corporate honcho played by none other than Jeremy Irons, Statham enacted revenge for people deprived of their life savings by capitalism gone rogue.

In addition to the scammer empire, The Beekeeper was replete with all kinds of chaos agents. Staying alive in this hornet’s nest proved a challenge, but luckily you can’t keep a good beekeeper down.

Before buzzing off into the sunset, our man Statham single-handedly kicked, punched and bludgeoned his way through South African henchmen, CIA agents and multiple waves of thugs for hire, all before taking out the big guns in the personage of the U.S. president.

A Working Man doesn’t go quite as bananas as its predecessor. In keeping with the title of the film, it goes about its job with a certain brusqueness of purpose: get in, kill a whole lotta baddies, save the innocents and get out.

But amid all the action-movie business as usual, some new issues have arisen — namely, who is supposed to be bad and who is presented as good.

To say that A Working Man enters theatres at a particularly strange moment is something of an understatement. The narrative infrastructure that has underpinned action films for decades is increasingly shaky, along with the portrayal of Americans as the movies’ perpetual good guys.

This change in the guard is addressed in the film’s title sequence that features Statham’s character Levon Cade, an ex-Royal Marine commando fighting with his U.S. compatriots in a series of unnamed conflicts. The British and American flags are conjoined, as are their military forces, in fighting for freedom, justice and global democracy.

Given the current state of the world, this seems almost quaint.

Good vs. evil. Is it really that easy?

The story trudges on, providing a little more backdrop to up the ante of kick, punch and pound.

After the death of his wife, Cade hangs up his war spurs and gets a job in construction. In a custody battle for his young daughter, who is being raised by her bougie grandfather, Cade sleeps in his truck and maintains a spartan existence to afford his legal bills.

Cade’s employers are the Garcia family, who built their company by hiring people of colour and immigrants. DEI is in the house; no ICE here! Mama and Papa Garcia dote on their superstar daughter Jenny, a talented young woman who gave up a piano scholarship to focus on getting a business degree so that she could help her family.

On a night out with friends, Jenny attracts the eyes of a pair of human traffickers who snatch her from a bar and deliver her into the hands of Russian mobsters who deal in human beings, as well as the usual stuff of guns, drugs and mayhem.

Cade gets the call to bring Jenny home and off he trucks in his GMC pickup, with help from his close friend Gunny Lefferty (David Harbour), a veteran and his Indigenous partner.

Inspired by Chuck Dixon’s 2014 novel Levon’s Trade, director Ayer makes odd choices in this film, but let’s start with the villain’s wardrobes. These range in complexity and weirdness, beginning with a pair of Russian thugs who dress in head-to-toe jacquard tracksuits, complete with patterned bucket hats.

Their father, a member of the Russian mob known only as the brotherhood, has a penchant for cool hats (a massive black homburg) as well as a cane topped with gold skull.

Evil is always natty. This holds true for the baddies across the board in the film. The rest of the evil doers are equally fashion-forward, from the dissolute son of a Russian oligarch who sports a silky white pajama ensemble topped by what looks to be a Three Musketeers-type hat to the tatted villainess who proclaims her commitment to evil by screaming “Fuck, fuck, fuck” all the way through the film.

Almost all the villains are punished for their fashion crimes, but the film reserves some of its worst punishment for a dapper perv who insists on wearing a velvet cape and a top hat. If ever there was an outfit that screamed, “I deserve to die, horribly!” it is this one.

Meanwhile, the good guys are resolutely plain in both dress and manners, beginning with Cade, clad in jeans and a work jacket, hardhat perched high atop his head like it’s afraid to sit down. So too is his buddy Gunny, whose wardrobe is as homespun as they come.

Where fact and fiction part ways

Leaving aside the bizarro fashion sense of the film, what lingers longer in A Working Man is the sense that political sides are in the process of changing. Here is where it gets weird, with the divergence between the cinematic world and the real world.

All the following folks are currently under attack in the U.S.: immigrants, veterans, women, Indigenous people, Black people, children. They are presented in the film as the heroes. Meanwhile the villains —Russian mobsters, corrupt cops and sex creeps — are presented as deserving of being mown down en masse.

In the usual narrative logic of an action movie, things are still pretty much what you might expect, but of course in the real world, these dichotomies have flipped.

As the U.S. increasingly embraces fascism, the previous pools of villains that everyone can agree upon are in the process of shifting. Billionaire tech bros, Russian oligarchs and corrupt government officials are now on the side of righteousness, whereas pretty much anyone left of centre is up for attack.

Which begs the question, how long before conventional action films also kowtow to the forces currently in power?

Can the days of mobsters and billionaires desiring to see themselves as cinematic heroes be far off?

It is curious to witness how the film is being marketed. There are spot ads that feature Statham as the white saviour for the poor, the powerless and the marginalized.

Since most action films are aimed at men, one could make the argument that the audience for Statham’s films is pretty bro-ish: white, male and heterosexual with an interest in guns, trucks and pretty ladies.

How do they view themselves in the context of the movie reality? Are they still the heroes?

As reality, or whatever you’d like to call it, gets stranger and stranger, how do movies keep up?

Given the production and release schedules of major studio films, there’s simply no way to keep pace with a fast-moving political reality. And this gives rise to the greater rift between the world onscreen and the actual world.

The experience of watching a movie like A Working Man in 2025 raises a few other curious questions. Many of the men in the Trump administration were likely raised on American films like Rambo, Rocky and Top Gun. Films in which American exceptionalism was a given, a concrete fact of life, even if it was really a jingoistic fantasy.

This worldview still colours American identity, as made explicitly clear in recent scandals like Pete Hegseth and his team planning their military strategy on Signal.

The fantasy of American exceptionalism has real-world implications. As U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff said of the Signal debacle, Hegseth and his team are like “Fox News personalities cosplaying as government officials.”

The crumbling plot infrastructure that has underpinned action films for many decades has been demolished, along with a good section of the image of Americans as the movies’ good guys.

So, what comes next?

I wonder how long it will be until American film producers start looking north. Maybe the next pool of nefarious action-movie types will hail from Regina or Edmonton.

‘A Working Man’ is now out in major theatres.

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