Ben O'Shea-A Working Man: There's Multiple Cans Of Whoop-Ass Opened!

Our movie guy Ben O'Shea was back in the studio with CLairsy & Lisa talking about the new Jason Statham movie called A Working Man. He gives his score out of 5 and tells us if we should be parting with our cash to go and see it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Great per flick with billow Sha, Hello, Hello, where do
we stand on Jason Stathan. Oh, he's a bit of fun.
He's a bit of fun. And for people who might
not know this, back in the day, he was a
competitive diver the for the British Commonwealth Games team. Yeah,

(00:20):
like like ten meter platform diving diving. So and he
so he was always he was a dude, an elite
athlete whom be very very disciplined, vomiting and yet exactly
so you know, those divers like rippled muscles, it's not
a shred of fat on them. And so then so
he has brought that same sort of work ethic and
level of discipline to his movie making and he's been prolific.

(00:42):
He's he's made some twenty seven movies in the last
ten years or something like that, which is just incredible
output in terms of the quality of those movies. Obviously
that's a different story. You know, like people will remember
him from lock Stock and Two Smoking Garrels and Snatch.
That was probably the high point of his career, those
films with Guy Ritchie and everything. Since then, when he's

(01:03):
just been an action star, there hasn't really been much
to a lot of those movies. He's been a transporter,
he's been a mechanic, he's been a bee key bart
and now you know that was probably one of his
one of his better movies in the last ten years.
Can maybe get onto that later. But so in this
latest movie, a working man, he's a working man gets

(01:26):
into fights hashtag relatable and so he could be said
in Pertho this movie, he gets on the beers on
a Friday night, but that's not what he's like. He's
a former Royal Marines commando. He's always a backstory who's
living in America. He's trying to, you know, hold down
a steady job on a construction site so he can

(01:48):
get a bit of money behind him so he can
get better visitation rights for his daughter. Here's always the daughter.
The daddy daughter storyline works so well because the tough
guy little girl. It shows the vulnerability, you know, you
have to have it like it's either that or a
dog like John Wick had a puppy, right, but a
puppy won't put your hair in pictisay, it doesn't. Based

(02:14):
on based on a book series about this about this
character Levin Cade, who is you know, this former Special
Forces soldier a very similar thing. Yeah, yeah, eleven leven
stranger and so and so. He works on this construction
site working for a family of Latin American migrants. The

(02:36):
father of the family played by Michael Penya, who's fantastic,
and they love him. They know that he's got some
sort of backstories, a bit mysterious, but they don't ask
any questions. They're just happy that he's there working hard
for them, doing a good job. And then one day
the daughter of this family gets abducted and they and
they come to Jason Statham's characters as please, mate, like,

(02:56):
we know, you know back in the day, you maybe
did some some dodgy stuff. He did some questionable stuff.
We know you've got a backstory. Can you use that
past to try and help us find our daughter? And
he's like, no, no, I can't. Like those days are
behind me. I'm just trying to stay on the straight.
I can keep it so I can keep seeing my daughter.
You know, her stepdad wants to take her away from me,

(03:17):
all this kind of stuff, but they eventually convince him
just have a bit of a look. Haven't been able
to look into it. It's John Rambo. They can't help you,
that's right, And he doesn't want to. He's very reluctant.
But he finds out that the Russian mafia are behind it,
and maybe this daughter, who's you know, sort of a
sort of late teens and who he always got on
really well with, is going to be sold into sex

(03:40):
trafficking horrible, horrible stuff, right, and so and he starts
to think. She looks at his own daughter and what
if this happened to her? And he goes he agrees,
you know what, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna have
a little bit of an investigation, okay, And then maybe
he wouldn't have gotten sucked all the way back into
a life of violence. Except the Russian mafia make the
the classic mistake. They go after his family, They go

(04:03):
after Jason Statham's daughter, and then and then you know,
there's there's multiple cans of whoop ass opened. And the
way these the way these films always work, right, is
the reluctant hero he gets he gets kind of slowly
pulled back into this world that he doesn't really want
to be a part of anymore. But then when they
you know, they push his buttons, they give him no

(04:24):
option and then the righteous fury, the righteous fury happens, yeah, exactly.
And then and so then that that's actually quite fun,
you know, like there's something about that Hollywood trope of
the of the righteous man getting vengeance on bad guys.
It's very very complet dismember exactly. And then all of
a sudden, it doesn't matter how violent it gets at

(04:45):
that point, because especially when you're talking about so one
Russian mafia, bad dudes, sex trafficking terrible of course. And
then and they're kind of went after John Wick's dog.
I mean, that's the thing. Once once the scriptwriter justifies them,
it's like game one, game on. And so because he's
a trade he's got a sledgehammer, he's got a nail gun,

(05:06):
he's got all sorts of stuff. So many of those
movies Lison and those, Jason Statham really is sort of
a younger elevated Liam because like, now, poor old Liam,
he's getting on a bit, like he's in his sixties,
maybe he's in his seventies, right, he can't do what
he used to right now, yeah, yeah, yeah, take them both. Yeah. Well,

(05:27):
at the second point, you start to question how good
he is as a father. If they keep getting taken. No,
you know that's not the case. So you get to
see him kick butt and really very few actors do
it better than Jason Statham. He does a lot of
his own stunts. He certainly does all of his own
fight scenes, and some of the fight scenes in this
film are amazing. Directed by David Air, who did who

(05:48):
did The Beekeeper, which was a huge, huge hit. No
one thought it was going to be any good. It
was actually really entertaining, and they're going to make more
Beekeeper movies. And so the action in this film is
really pretty good. The storyline, you know, you've seen it
a million times. You don't go see these movies for
the storyline. You go see them for Jason Statham to
beat up bad guys, and he certainly does that a lot.

(06:10):
All right, Well, how many triple flips with a pike
or whatever. I'm going to give this three solid popcorn movies.