Jason Statham has a new movie out. He plays with a guy who used to work in a violent profession, but he’s sworn to leave that life behind. But now some bad people have messed with his employer (the only people to help him out when he was at a low point), and he’s going to make the bad guys pay. Cue a series of investigations, interrogations, and of course, action sequences. He’ll go through several tiers of bad guys, until he’s contending with a huge crime empire that probably could have gone on unimpeded if a low-level employee hadn’t caused problems for Statham. Oh, and the whole thing is directed by David Ayer. The movie is called “The Beekeeper 2.” Okay, not really, it’s called “A Working Man,” but as similar as it is to that Statham vehicle from last year, it might as well be.

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Statham plays Levon Cade, a former soldier now living out of his pickup truck and working construction under the kindly Garcia family. Daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) gets kidnapped by human traffickers, and father Joe (Michael Peña) offers Cade some much-needed money to get her back. Cade needs the money and stability to help in the custody battle for his daughter (Isla Gie) against his father-in-law, the Most Punchable Man in the World (Richard Heap). With a little help and encouragement from his blind comrade Gunny (David Harbour), Cade sets out on a mission to rescue Jenny.

Cade’s path of destruction will pit him against drug dealers, biker gangs, corrupt cops, and Russian gangsters, and all of that before the human traffickers. In an unusual move, Cade doesn’t spend the whole movie working his way up to the highest-ranking Russian gangster (Jason Flemyng), rather, he spends about half the movie working up to the Big Bad and the other half working his way down, since the human trafficking is just a small part of the Russian mafia’s operation. The villains he really wants are bumbling couple Viper (Emmett J. Scanlan) and Artemis (Eve Mauro), and they’re so incompetent that a deus ex machina does half the work for him.

The movie doesn’t work as straightforward excitement, the most entertainment I got was laughing at how stupid it is. There’s the staggering idiocy by most of the bad guys – it’s hard to believe they were ever smart enough to put together a criminal empire. And yes, this is the kind of movie where Cade has expert marksmanship and not a single bad guy can hit the broad side of a barn. Some of the characters just look ridiculous, especially the nephews of the Flemyng character, who are dressed like they’re going to a costume party as 80’s break dancers. There’s an actual costume party in the last act and the partygoers there don’t look half as gaudy as these schnooks.

My favorite way to pass the time during “A Working Man” was pretending that the Russian gangsters were connected to the goons from “Anora.” Like maybe the Flemyng character and Anora’s Russian boyfriend had the same interior decorator or something (both houses give off the same fancy-but-the-owners-don’t-enjoy-it vibe). What I’m saying is that I checked out of this garbage movie and started thinking about a better one. That is, when I wasn’t thinking about another crummy Statham/Ayer movie in “The Beekeeper,” which this movie just lazily retreads. Sitting through “A Working Man” was real work.

Grade: C-

“A Working Man” is rated R for strong violence, language throughout, and drug content. Its running time is 116 minutes.

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.