The new movie “A Working Man” has many similarities to the great Liam Neeson movie “Taken” from 2008. The entire screenplay plays like Taken with one man taking on significant gangs of criminals, in this case, three different gangs, corrupt police, a young woman kidnapped into a human trafficking ring, and a dramatic ending with Levon Cade, played by Jason Statham finding the young woman named Carla, played by Noemi Gonzalez also very similar to the ending of Taken.
The attempts to make this movie different than Taken, with Levon Cade an employee of a family of a construction company to find their kidnapped daughter are not enough to erase constant reminders of Taken throughout this two-hour movie. A Working Man was written by Sylvester Stallone, David Ayer, and Chuck Dixon making it more unusual that with three writers nobody could think of enough new ideas to turn what could have been a much better new story idea, into an obvious clone of Taken.
The acting in this film is good, with David Harbour and Michael Peña and the action scenes are what anyone would expect with a Jason Statham movie. The ending has a major flaw with about 20 bikers running into a bar trying to kill Cade, and later they are nowhere to be found, with Cade fighting the lead biker at the end. As with all movies like this one, when there are multiple people shooting guns and machine guns against one other person, there is no way one person would survive with that many bullets. But this is a movie, not real life.
The Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 53% are accurate and I do not recommend this movie, that did not try to be more original.
A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies. 