Jason Statham’s Routine Vigilante Bruiser

Jason Statham is good at his job, which explains why he keeps booking the same kinds of movies — well, that and the fact that people keep watching them. Reuniting the British action star with “The Beekeeper” writer-director David Ayer, “A Working Man” makes the least effort yet to provide backstory or motive before sending Statham’s latest character, Levon Cade, on a spectacularly violent rampage. Statham’s responsibility here is to make the Royal Marines veteran turned Chicago construction foreman look experienced enough to do serious damage, without directly repeating the dozen other movies in which he’s done so already.

Statham plays the “reluctant” vigilante, putting aside his uniquely lethal skill set for a respectable job and shared custody of his young daughter (Isla Gie), which isn’t so easy while living out of a rented pickup truck. Before the trouble starts, Levon is beloved by all, with co-workers bringing him homemade meals and his boss, Joe Garcia (Michael Peña), giving the troubled ex-commando a chance to go straight. Then Joe’s college-age daughter, Carla (Noemi Gonzalez), is abducted by Russian goons while out celebrating her first semester in business school. It’s not his daughter, but Levon furrows that glorious brow of his and swears to do whatever it takes to bring her home — even if, it turns out, Carla is resourceful enough, she may not even need his help.

The only real surprise here is learning that “A Working Man” was adapted from a novel. “Levon’s Trade” is the first in a terse 12-book series by Chuck Dixon, which comes with the line “Levon is bad ass. Makes Jack Reacher seem like a crossing guard” on the back cover — a blurb with no source, expressed with roughly the same grammatical finesse as Dixon’s prose. Screenplay credit goes to Ayer and Sylvester Stallone, which makes sense. This is the kind of character Stallone made popular in the 1980s, when critics pushed back…