In Review: 'Death of a Unicorn,' 'A Working Man'

Death of a Unicorn
Dir. Alex Scharfman
104 min. 

The pre-fab cult classic Death of a Unicorn is an ambitious attempt to fuse earnest family drama, surreal horror, and a class satire about the self-serving fake-altruism of the ultra-elite. It fails at all three individually, but it’s also a little bit worse than the sum of its parts. Each element feels underdeveloped, partly due to the laziness of director Alex Scharfman’s screenplay, but also because they are so frequently in conflict: The premise seems to invite a ruthless, Yorgos Lanthimos-esque skewering of contemporary social mores, but the drippy relationship between a middle-aged widower consumed with getting ahead and his perpetually disillusioned grown daughter limits its punch. And the idea of giant, impossible creatures out for bloody revenge sounds like Jurassic Park, but gets reduced to a campy joke with half-invested CGI mayhem. The film never figures itself out, and there’s only fitful evidence it would have worked if it had. 

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Miscast in the almost tragically square role of the distracted father, Paul Rudd stars as Elliot Kintner, a would-be executive type called up to a remote location in the Canadian Rockies for a crisis management summit. With his annoyed teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) in town, Elliot starts taking a long and winding road up through a nature preserve, which gives them a chance to argue about how their relationship has deteriorated since his wife died. As a widower who wants to secure Ridley’s future, Elliot sees the weekend as an important opportunity to curry favor with his Big Pharma boss Odell (Richard E. Grant), Odell’s wife Belinda (Téa Leoni), and their failson Shepard (Will Poulter). But in a moment where he takes his eyes off the road, he hits a strange animal that turns out, upon closer inspection, to be a unicorn foal. 

For a while, Elliot’s plan is to arrive at the estate and pretend that he doesn’t have this magical, mythical being crammed into the trunk of his banged-up rental SUV. (Cue a lot of sitcom-level explanations for the strange thumping noises coming from outside in the driveway. Somehow they don’t include fake-sneezing or coughing.) Then when Odell’s family becomes aware of the unicorn and the healing properties of its milky purple blood, they set their team of scientists to work, first to cure the terminally ill Odell and then to exploit the precious substance for profit. Meanwhile, the degenerate Shepard discovers that the shavings from the creature’s horn are quite potent when snorted through a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill, too. 

The foal also has a family, however, that doesn’t take kindly to their little one being treated so shabbily. And so The Death of a Unicorn expands into a gory melee where humans try to fend off seemingly immortal ruminants who can use their sharp horns for stabbing them in the guts. There’s some potential here for a Tremors-like showdown between bunkered-in humans with guns fending off the exotic foes peeling toward their compound, but the film doesn’t have as much fun as it should, given the comic potential of sticking Richard E. Grant in a gruesome supernatural battle royale. Most of the laughs come courtesy of Poulter as a freewheeling dipshit of the Donald Trump Jr. mold who’s always doing the basest possible thing, whether that means harvesting unicorns for profit or getting high on their horns. If unstopped, he will lead humanity to a future dumber and more venal than ever imagined before. — Scott Tobias  

Death of a Unicorn opens in theaters everywhere tonight.

A Working Man
Dir. David Ayer
116 min.

Tiziana Corvisieri is the costume designer for A Working Man, the agreeable new Jason Statham vehicle directed by David Ayer, who teamed up with him last year on the giddily ridiculous The Beekeeper.* Costume designers do not usually get singled out in reviews like this one, much less in the lede, but Corvisieri goes absolutely hog wild in peacocking the film’s Russian gangsters. Generally speaking, Russian gangsters operating in an American city like Chicago would have to keep a low profile—though in this political climate, who the hell knows anymore?—but in A Working Man, they’re as easy to spot as a Times Square pimp in the 1970s. Corvisieri outfits them with glossy, multi-colored casual suits, sparkling rings and canes, and even gives one character an old-fashioned top hat, as if he’d been teleported from late 18th century high society. They’re runway-ready cartoon villains.

They also help set the tone for A Working Man, a mostly boilerplate thriller that needs every bit of color that Corvisieri can provide. Adapted from Levon’s Trade by Chuck Dixon, a comic book veteran best known for his work on the Punisher, the film was originally developed for television by Sylvester Stallone (who gets a co-scripting credit here) and it’s a throwback to the sort of military-grade revenge pictures Stallone turned out in the ‘80s. Statham stars as Levon, an ex-Royal Marines commando who’s nursing PTSD while pouring money from his construction job into a custody battle over his daughter. But that fight gets put on the back burner when Russian gangsters abduct his boss’ teenage daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) for a human trafficking wing and Levon opts to use his particular set of skills to get her back.

What happens next is every bit as straightforward as it sounds, which serves Statham’s no-nonsense screen persona just fine. Levon simply follows a breadcrumb trail of scumbags until he reaches the center of the criminal underworld, maiming or killing anyone who stands in his way. Ayer, a former Naval technician with a long list of hard-edged action movies to his credit, doesn’t modulate his aggressive style much, but he likes to reach for striking images, even if they’re a little silly. The climax of A Working Man, for example, plays out under a full moon so absurdly gigantic that it threatens to turn into a werewolf movie or the closing moments of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Ayer is not afraid to court ridiculousness.

And yet, if anything, A Working Man might have benefitted from being even more ridiculousness. There’s nothing in the film that approaches the pleasure of Statham in The Beekeeper pulling up to the scam call center with a couple of canisters of gasoline in his pickup truck, intending to burn the whole building to the ground. Watching stoic dudes bust their way through waves of foreign mob henchmen is about as basic as vigilante action movies get—Liam Neeson made a second career out of it—so anything Ayer can do to add color to A Working Man makes a difference. Setting the costume designer loose is a start, but more should have followed. — Scott Tobias

* I’m surprised to see I only gave The Beekeeper two-and-a-half stars despite being quite entertained by it. So consider the rating bumped up a little in retrospect.

A Working Man opens in theaters everywhere tonight.