A WORKING MAN (2025) *** ½

I’ve been seeing a lot of people online griping that “A Working Man is no Beekeeper”.  Fair enough, but that kind of blanket statement undersells just how good the film is.  The fact that it doesn’t quite hit the heights of The Beekeeper should in no way be taken as a slight to A Working Man, the latest collaboration between Jason Statham and director David Ayer.  Saying “A Working Man is no Beekeeper” is like saying “The Magnificent Ambersons is no Citizen Kane”.  That’s true enough, but dude, it’s still The Magnificent fucking Ambersons. 

Statham plays a former soldier working as a humble construction worker.  When his boss’s daughter is kidnapped by Russian slavers, he goes to work.  And by “goes to work”, I mean he blows away a bunch of Russian gangsters, grubby drug dealers, and skeevy bikers. 

Boasting a script co-written by Rambo himself, Sylvester Stallone, A Working Man is a better than average Statham vehicle that gives the audience exactly what they came to see.  Ayer plays to Statham strengths, and Stallone’s script gives him a stoic character that fits him like a glove.  Sure, he doesn’t have the great one-liners like he did in The Beekeeper, but the film is essentially wall to wall action and packed to the gills with scenes of Statham taking out the trash.  Because of that, all is right with the world. 

The supporting cast is strong across the board. Jason Flemyng (Statham’s co-star from his early Guy Ritchie movies) is good as the head of the Russian mob.  David Harbour has a lot of chemistry with Statham as his blind war buddy who acts as a mix of conscience and weapons supplier.  Arriana Rivas is also memorable as the kidnapped girl. 

Is the film perfect?  Well, it runs a little long and some of the action scenes suffer from over-editing and less than optimal camerawork.  (The bulk of the action is A-OK though.)  These are relatively minor quibbles than anything.  At the end of the day, A Working Man gets the job done. 

SNATCHED! CURSE OF THE PINK PANTIES 2 (2010) *

When I stumbled upon this sequel, I had never seen, let alone heard of the wonderfully titled Curse of the Pink Panties.  Since I couldn’t find the original streaming anywhere, I went ahead and watched this one.  Not seeing the first film in a series has never stopped me from checking out its sequel in the past.  Why should I stop now?

A woman tries on a pair of haunted panties and is unable to take them off.  As it turns out, the undies are possessed by the ghosts of some dead criminals.  She is then kidnapped by an evil villainess who wants to control the ghosts for her own devious purposes.  Meanwhile, two girls who survived the Curse of the Pink Panties in the first film launch an unsuccessful web show about their paranormal experiences.  The bad chick eventually kidnaps them too and wants to use their expertise to help harness the ghosts’ energy.  Our heroine’s boyfriend then turns to a busty psychic for help. 

The effects for the spirits of the men who haunt the panties are terrible.  They are nothing more than green-screened faces superimposed over a shot of women’s underwear.  Since these scenes are neither funny nor sexy, one would have to assume that the director had a fetish for seeing men’s faces crudely inserted onto a woman’s bikini area.  Why else would anyone make two movies on the subject, let alone one? 

There are also way too many subplots and characters that bog things down.  It might’ve helped if I saw the first movie, but this one is just saddled with too much rigmarole.  It should be said that while nearly all the ladies in the cast are smoking hot, none of them remove the titular panties (or their bras as a matter of fact).  This chaste aura does nothing to help the film as the running time clocks in at an extremely bloated one-hundred-and-eight-minutes.  I’m not saying nudity could’ve salvaged this mess, but it would’ve taken some of the sting out of it, that’s for sure.  Heck, even if it was a half-hour shorter, it still would’ve been a chore to sit through (especially the finale featuring the overweight guy running around in lingerie).

AKA:  Snatched!