ScreenRant agrees with my contention that for the next Levon Cade film, the filmmakers should just trust the Legend’s storytelling instead of attempting to “improve” upon it. Warning: contains spoilers.
A Working Man adapted the thriller novel Levon’s Trade, and almost every change it made was for the worse. The movie reunites Jason Statham with director David Ayer, fresh off their $162 million success with The Beekeeper. A Working Man cast Statham as Levon Cade, a retired Royal Marines Commando tasked with rescuing his boss’ kidnapped daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) from human traffickers. The film is broadly faithful to Chuck Dixon’s Levon’s Trade, with many of the same characters and story beats appearing.
Still, it also makes some sweeping changes to the source material that make it feel very different. A Working Man’s ending leaves the door open a crack for a potential sequel (there are currently 11 sequel novels to Levon’s Trade), but time will tell if a follow-up actually happens. The adaptation has earned mixed reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but its box office suggests it could be the start of another Jason Statham franchise.
Levon’s Trade is a much darker story
If there was a key difference between A Working Man and Levon’s Trade, it would be tonal. Dixon’s book reads like a gritty 1970s pulp thriller and is considerably meaner than the Statham film. This includes the ending, where Levon confronts Dimi, the Russian gangster who kidnapped Jenny. In the movie, Jenny is confirmed to be alive from an early point, and her kidnappers plan to sell her to a rich client. In the novel, Levon learns that Jenna (her name in the book) died the night Dimi took, having choked on her own vomit after he drugged her.
This casts a tragic pall over the whole story, and the only comfort Levon can take from completing his mission is that her father will know what happened.
This has always been, and will probably always be, a pet peeve of mine. Being experienced in multiple media myself, I understand the necessity of transforming a story when it is translated from one language or one medium to another. But the observable fact is that most transformations that are made are not actually necessary, and are only implemented because the director wants to tell his version of the story rather than the original storyteller’s version of it.
And since few directors are writers or storytellers, their changes are reliably for the worse. In fact, due to their limited knowledge bases, their changes are almost always cliched repetitions of something another director already did, and did better.