Drive-In Double Feature: A Working Man & The Woman in the Yard

The drive-in experience has been a part of my life ever since I was very little — in fact, one of my first memories at the drive-in was when they brought back Blazing Saddles in the early 1980s and I remember watching my mom laugh so hard she cried while I sat in the back seat of her late 1970s Pontiac Sunbird that night playing with my Strawberry Shortcake dolls. With life and my budget being what it is lately, it’s been about 7 months since I was last at the drive-in (we did Twisters and Trap on August 29th, 2024), but when I found some extra cash stashed away amongst some receipts in my wallet, I decided it was time to head out to enjoy the outdoor movie experience.

This time, though, we were getting to try out the West Wind Drive-In here in Las Vegas, which will now be our home away from home since moving. The double feature we got to enjoy was A Working Man, featuring the eternally badass Jason Statham, and The Woman in the Yard, directed by Juame Collet-Serra and starring the phenomenal Danielle Deadwyler.

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With A Working Man, it’s the movie that is exactly what you’d be expecting from it, especially if you’ve been paying attention to Statham’s career as of late. He’s a good guy (a working man, if you will) who has to take on some bad guys here in order to bring home his boss’s daughter who has been kidnapped by some human traffickers working in the Chicagoland area. What starts off as a pretty straightforward scenario becomes extremely elaborate from there, as Statham’s character Levon Cade (who just so happens to be former Black Ops) has to infiltrate a drug operation working out of Joliet and must contend with the Russian mafia after getting in their crosshairs during his campaign to rescue his employer’s kid.

With A Working Man, I’m of two minds about it. There are things I really enjoyed, like Statham being Statham in the most Stathamist of ways, and that’s never not enjoyable. There are also some pretty excellent set pieces in A Working Man that left me giddy as they unfolded, and I will always be excited to see David Harbour show up in anything, and he’s great here as usual. But there’s a lot about A Working Man that just didn’t really do much for me, like the incredibly plodding script from director David Ayer and Sylvester Stallone that has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer repeatedly beating you upside the head.

Couple that with a plot that feels so weirdly overwrought with recent action tropes that are usually cool, but they feel like they’re just checking off some boxes here for the sake of checking them off, and there were times when I was laughing so hard, and it wasn’t for good reasons. It made me wish that Ayers and Stallone’s script had maybe leaned more into the ridiculousness of everything going on in A Working Man as it had these slight action camp vibes to it that Ayers’ approach often felt at odds with. Like, there’s a character who looks like he’s dressed up like The Penguin from the original Batman television series, and it’s played totally straight.

The other thing that felt really off about A Working Man was how a lot of this story was centered around the mid-central area of Illinois, where the elite members of the seedy underbelly of the criminal world in the Midwest supposedly would head out to for all sorts of nefarious activities. And as someone who spent more than 30 years in Illinois, this was the part of the film that just felt the silliest because no one is heading out towards Clifton or Pontiac to do anything if they live anywhere in the Chicago-adjacent region.

As a whole, A Working Man was fine, and there were certainly aspects that I enjoyed, but Statham deserves so much better material to work with than what he was given here. He’s clearly having fun, and that helps, but I did spend a better part of the movie wishing I was watching The Beekeeper instead.

The Woman in the Yard marks Juame Collet-Serra’s return to horror after spending nearly a decade away (his last feature was the most excellent The Shallows which featured Blake Lively taking on a shark), and for the most part, it’s really solid work from the Spanish-American filmmaker. Here, he explores the insidious nature of grief (in all of its forms) as the mysterious titular entity appears out of nowhere on the farm of Ramona (the aforementioned Danielle Deadwyler) who ominously declares, “Today’s the day.” From there, the woman begins to subtly torment Ramona and her kids, Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and Annie (Estella Kahiha), as we’re initially led to believe that the eponymous character is a fixture of Ramona’s grief over the recent loss of her husband.

But as the script pulls back the layers on what’s really going on with Ramona, and how her emotional state is more driven by her depression and how she’s been harboring some self-destructive tendencies for a while, I think that’s when The Woman in the Yard does work the best. This isn’t just a story about a woman who misses her husband, this is a story about a woman who has been grieving the loss of her identity for some time now because she supported the dreams of her husband of a different life for their family.

We learn in The Woman in the Yard that Ramona has been struggling for some time now, and the only thing that has kept her from ending her life has been her kids, but her depression keeps pulling her further and further away from them. So, the arrival of The Woman in the Yard is something of a reckoning for Deadwyler’s character, who must come to terms with just what exactly she wants out of her life — or if she even wants to continue living at all.

That’s what I think makes the story so compelling and I wish there had been more of a focus on that struggle that Ramona has been dealing with for so long, because I think it’s a difficulty that a lot of people face (I didn’t have kids but I went through something very similar in my late twenties). That being said, I get why a lot of folks aren’t necessarily connecting with The Woman in the Yard because both the material and the tone are extremely heavy, and the film is being presented as something very different in the marketing.

With its PG-13 rating, The Woman in the Yard feels like a movie that should welcome teens in droves, but this isn’t really a story that feels like it would resonate with younger generations (especially considering everything going on right now where folks may be just looking for some scare-driven escapism). But as someone who is a bit older and has been through similar struggles, it landed pretty well with me, and I also really enjoyed how Deadwyler’s own artistic creations were incorporated into the story as well, resulting in a film that felt that much more raw and authentic.

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