Wrath Of Man: Jason Statham's Killer Rent-A-Cop Delivers Deadly Force… and Worse Dialogue
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
English director Guy Ritchie popped onto the scene in 1999 and 2000 with two insolently funny action movies — Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and Snatch — before getting lost in the wilderness of blockbuster-director-for-hire.
This career side trip gave us two Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies, plus King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and the live-action Aladdin. With Wrath of Man, following 2019’s The Gentlemen, he is back on his original turf, exploring the world of misbehaving men.
Jason Statham - You’ve just tried to rob the wrong armoured truck.
Both a heist film and a revenge story, Ritchie’s Wrath of Man is the cinema equivalent of a hollow-point bullet. It’s not weighty, but it causes a lot of destruction.
Appropriately, it stars the human equivalent of a high-speed projectile, Brit action star Jason Statham, reuniting with the director after 16 years. Here he plays Hill, a security guard with a secret agenda who signs on with a Los Angeles armoured truck company.
Hill is brought on as reinforcement after a gang ambushed one of the trucks, leaving two guards and a civilian dead. Fortico’s new-guy trainer, who calls himself Bullet (Holt McCallany) decides to dub the new employee “H,” which could be for his name or maybe for “husky-voiced He-Man.”
After taking pains to establish himself as an antisocial loner, H blows his cover. During another holdup on his first day of work, he reveals himself to be an elite marksman, killing a half dozen of the bad guys (including one played by rapper Post Malone) while saving his colleagues and $2.5 million. The company brass are delighted, but his co-workers are more suspicious than ever.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
In the first of several chronological jumps, we learn that H has a shady past, and a personal tragedy, which has led him to take the armoured truck job. The premise of the bad guy gone straight to serve his vengeful aims comes from the movie’s source material, a 2008 French film Le Convoyeur (Cash Truck).
Statham, who typically tempers his over-ripe macho persona with a sarcastic swagger, is restricted as the quiet mysterious type, though he’s as good as he needs to be.
A worse problem is the atrociously strained dialogue, full of so many homophobic insults you start to think these guys should just drop their tactical gear and get a room. There’s one woman on the crew (Niamh Algar), who’s treated like H’s marksmanship prize, and there are several name actors in small parts (Eddie Marsan, Josh Hartnett, comedian Rob Delaney). There’s also Andy Garcia, as an FBI agent willing to turn a blind eye to H’s violence so long as the body count is on the bad guys’ side of the ledger, though he notes, “I can only look confused for so long.”
The film’s final third switches to H’s antagonists, a platoon of disenchanted war-vets-turned-robbers, led by Jackson (Jeffrey Donovan) and loose cannon Jan (Scott Eastwood), and to an inevitable final shoot-out, with sufficiently dynamic editing and brutality to keep you, if not on the edge of your seat, at least alert.
Perhaps influenced by better examples (Michael Mann’s Heat comes to mind), Wrath of Man has a kind of cumbersome self-importance with its bruise coloured palette, and a musical theme that saws on the nerves.
There are separate chapters, and chronological loops, and one scene replayed from different points of view, creating an impression of complexity. This isn’t so much a bad movie as a pointless one, impossible to take seriously or to enjoy as suspenseful escapism.
Wrath of Man. Directed and written by Guy Ritchie with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, based upon the French film Le Convoyeur. Starring Jason Statham, Holt McCallany, Jeffrey Donovan, Josh Hartnett, Laz Alonso, Raúl Castillo, Deobia Oparei, Eddie Marsan and Scott Eastwood. Available on VOD beginning May 25.