A Working Man is yet another outing for a particular flavour of retributive escapism. Like Death Wish, Die Hard, and (Rambo) First Blood it's based on a novel, but what's astonishing is that despite tonal similarities to works from the 1970s the source novel is from 2014.

This review was delayed in part because I wanted to track down a copy. The film having been produced (and co-written) by Sylvester Stallone, I wondered how much of Chuck Dixon's novel Levon's Trade had made the transition to screen. I wondered how much of its regressive tendencies had been added. Among the film's bad habits there's the obligatory dead wife, the fetishisation of special forces, as with Taken the complications inherent in the layered politics of human trafficking, some queer-coded villainy and almost inevitably lockstep adherence to the monomyth of the hero's journey.

What astonished me more than the initial...