Jason Statham’s New Action Movie Is A Perfect Replacement For Liam Neeson’s $929 Million Franchise
Jason Statham has been one of the biggest names in the action genre for a long time, and his most recent film, A Working Man, is shaping up to be another solid hit for the actor. The movie has earned over $60 million over the course of two weeks in theaters, against its $40 million production budget, which is a pretty great start. Despite A Working Man‘s mediocre reviews, it is well-suited to become a new action franchise, taking over for a similar series that has been dormant for seven years.
That series is obviously the Taken franchise, the trilogy of action films led by Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, as well as a prequel TV series that ran for two seasons from 2017 to 2018. While the show never really went anywhere, and the trilogy was seeing diminishing returns by the time the third one came around, the first Taken movie is still one of the most iconic action films of the late 2000s, and A Working Man‘s story and characters are very reminiscent of the franchise.
A Working Man Is Basically Jason Statham’s Version Of Taken
The Two Franchises Have Numerous Similarities
While action movies have a long history of being plenty derivative of one another, and Taken‘s story was never anything too revolutionary or groundbreaking, plenty of scenes in A Working Man, including its ending, exhibit clear similarities to the Taken franchise, enough that it could certainly act as a replacement series. Taken‘s main plot revolves around a man who must rescue his kidnapped daughter from a group of traffickers, which is essentially the story in A Working Man.
|
Movie |
Rotten Tomatoes Score |
|---|---|
|
Taken |
60% |
|
Taken 2 |
22% |
|
Taken 3 |
13% |
|
A Working Man |
50% |
Even though A Working Man‘s Levon Cade isn’t rescuing his daughter, the girl who is kidnapped in this film is put in a very similar role, as she is the daughter of a family that Cade is very close to. Cade and Mills are both also ex-military operators, and, even if the retired military man is a staple of the action genre, that aspect of the main character’s backstory is another similarity that makes A Working Man the new version of Taken.
A Working Man Becoming A Franchise Is Better Than More Taken Movies
The Taken Franchise Has Completely Run Its Course
While Taken remains an iconic property to this day, that franchise is likely best served as a memory, as opposed to any sort of reboot or continuation of the series. The original Taken film trilogy mostly got worse over time, with the first movie standing strong as a fairly decent action flick, the second feeling like a worse version of the first, and the third representing the franchise’s last gasp. A Working Man isn’t the most innovative action film, but it is a much fresher IP than Taken, and should be the one to continue.
