All Of The Bad Guys In 'A Working Man' Are Dressed Like They Are In Different Kinds Of Movies

ALSO THIS WEEK: Bees, alien, and Harrison Ford

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: I love fashion

Jason Statham is dressed like Jason Statham in A Working Man. That’s his character in the picture above. Flannel shirt over a hoodie, unmarked baseball cap, basically the same outfit he wears throughout The Beekeeper, which makes sense because the character is basically the same guy: blue collar job or hobby (construction, beekeeping), secret military past (black ops, Beekeeping), forced into action because a wrong was committing against someone he cares about (daughter of his boss, Phylicia Rashad), etc. The Beekeeper is a better movie, by a lot, but it is still very much A Jason Statham Movie. Not a complaint.

What’s more interesting to me about this movie is the collection of villains and goons he faces on his journey. It’s like a video game where he has to defeat a series of unique and loosely connected bosses at the end of each level. It’s also incredible because all of these bad guys are dressed like they are characters in completely different kinds of movies.

Examples will help. Let’s look at some examples…

This is a Russian mob boss who wears a suit and an ascot while sitting around his mansion. He is dressed like a character in a Liam Neeson movie.

This is another Russian mob boss and his two idiot sons. The boss is always wearing black jackets draped over his shoulders and little hats like these and he carries a cane with a skull on the top of it. He is dressed like a character in a John Wick movie.

The idiot sons are always wearing brightly colored floral tracksuits with gold chains hanging from their necks. They are dressed like characters in a Guy Ritchie movie.

What we have here:

• Full-length sparkly trenchcoat

• Lots of eye makeup

• Automatic weapon in a nightclub

This man is dressed like he is in a Matrix sequel.

I couldn’t get a clean screencap but it is important to note that, moments after what we see here, this man literally dons a cape and top hat and struts through this underground casino.

He is dressed like The Penguin.

This guy is the leader of a gang of bikers who sell meth out of a roadside bar. He wears a leather vest with no shirt under it and sits atop a throne made of motorcycle parts and handlebars bent to look like demonic horns. He is dressed like he is in a Mad Max movie. He is my favorite.

The guy on the left is another idiot son and the guy on the right is his lackey, who is only addressed in this movie as “Viper” and looks enough like Rob McElhenney from some angles that it distracted me from Statham whomping on people.

The temptation here is to make a joke. Something like “the guy on the left is dressed like he is an evil wizard in a movie where Tom Hardy does a voice,” but the truth is that these guys — as wild as they are, and yes, that is a silver tray of party drugs being presented to them — are the only villains in here who are dressed like characters in a Jason Statham movie.

Do I say this mostly as an excuse to remind everyone that Tommy Lee Jones showed up in the sequel to The Mechanic looking like this?

Maybe.

It is my great hope that they make a sequel to this massively stupid movie and keep introducing ridiculous villains. Give me an angry general who smokes a cigar but also has a mohawk. Give me a crime lord who lives in a hollowed-out glacier and struts around in a fur coat. Give me a gang of evil human traffickers who get around on pogo sticks. We are only limited by the furthest reaches of our imaginations. Let’s dream big.

FOUR: Real life (bees) has once again imitated art (BEES)