WRATH OF MAN: Not Mad, Just Disappointed

Nearly 23 years ago, Guy Ritchie’s feature-length directorial debut Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels burst onto movie screens with a blast of gunfire and grit. The darkly comic story of a group of small-time criminals who decide to rob the literal gang next door introduced audiences to a former member of the British national diving team who had been working as a model and a street seller. Indeed, Jason Statham’s background as a black-market salesman is on full display in the film’s incredibly memorable opening scene, in which his character hawks stolen goods to a crowd of curious onlookers who cannot resist his charms: “Anyone like jewelry? Look at that one there. Handmade in Italy, hand-stolen in Stepney. It’s as long as my arm, I wish it was as long as something else.”

Statham teamed up with Ritchie once again for the director’s equally acclaimed sophomore feature, Snatch, and later for the much more mediocre Revolver. Since then, Statham has become one of the biggest action stars of the twenty-first century (and one of my favorite actors, too) while Ritchie has tried his hand at big-budget reinventions of characters like Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur, and even Aladdin. But nothing else Ritchie has done has quite matched the spark of his first two films with Statham, which is why their fourth collaboration, Wrath of Man, has been eagerly anticipated by many moviegoers, myself included.

Perhaps our expectations were too high after 16 years of waiting, and that’s why the film is such a letdown. For Wrath of Man fails to make the most of an inventive story structure and a typically solid Statham performance, smothering both under a layer of bland masculinity with none of the style and swagger that made Ritchie’s early work so memorable.

Cash On Delivery

A remake of the French thriller Cash Truck (a title that Ritchie absolutely should have stuck with for his version), Wrath of Man begins with an attempted heist on an armored truck that quickly turns tragic. Soon afterward, we’re introduced to a mysterious man named H (Statham) as he interviews for a job at Fortico Security, the company whose truck was attacked in the opening scene. Despite manager Terry (Eddie Marsan) telling him that two Fortico guards died in that incident, H is nonplussed about the dangers of the job, and after some tests of his skills at the trigger and the wheel, he is hired.

H is welcomed into the Fortico fold by veteran guard Bullet (Holt McCallany), though others, including the bizarrely nicknamed Boy Sweat Dave (Josh Hartnett), don’t trust the motivations of the stoic newcomer. H’s character is further called into question after he single-handedly stops another heist, dispatching the would-be robbers with expert marksmanship that he conveniently kept under wraps when he was hired. Bullet dismisses the notion that H is a cop, but if he isn’t, where else did he acquire such a special set of skills?

Flashbacks soon reveal that H is a former crime boss whose teenage son was killed as a bystander in that opening heist; H is determined to track down the men responsible and avenge his son’s death. After his criminal connections fail to uncover the identities of the men responsible, H decides to go inside at Fortico and see what he can find out. A parallel set of flashbacks reveals the robbers: a group of disenchanted military veterans led by Jackson (Jeffrey Donovan). As H continues to dig for information, Jackson and his crew, including loose cannon Jan (Scott Eastwood, who seems to specialize in playing the kinds of characters his father’s characters would beat up), prepare for one last big score that should set them up for life. Their target? The Fortico Security truck depot on Black Friday.

Manly Masculine Men

The impending collision between H and the men responsible for his son’s death should be an exciting, tension-filled affair, especially with the reveal that Jackson has a friend working on the inside at Fortico. Will H figure out that one of his colleagues is a traitor before it’s too late? What will happen when he realizes he’s been working alongside one of the people he has been trying to find for so long? The two storylines—H’s revenge and the gang’s final heist—speed towards each other like two trains fated to crash and burn in a horrific explosion, and that climactic showdown, riddled with bullets and betrayals, doesn’t disappoint. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the film does, and in a big way.

Apart from the cleverly pieced-together plot—the flashback structure of which was borrowed from the original Cash Truck—there is little about Wrath of Man that stands out from the endless stream of straight-to-DVD crime thrillers populating your local Redbox. The cinematography is flat and lacking in creativity, while the only interesting thing about the soundtrack is the use of a sleazy-sounding remix of “Folsom Prison Blues” to score a montage of H and his cronies wreaking havoc on the criminal underworld. The dialogue, however, might be the biggest offense to my moviegoing sensibilities, as it feels less like it was written by Ritchie (collaborating with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies) and more like it was written by a group of high-school-age boys at recess after watching Lock, Stock for the first time.

Statham—whose stoic performance has been criticized by some critics but won’t be by me, as I think it suits the character of H to a T—and Marsan—who lends an entertaining rabbity anxiety to Terry—make the most of their mediocre material, but most of the supporting cast struggle to sound even remotely believable. It’s hard to blame the actors, though, when they’ve been saddled with a script in which every line is written to sound like a devastating kiss-off despite most of them being downright cringeworthy. Even Statham’s natural charisma cannot make a snide comeback about poo-poo sound anything less than unbearably juvenile. If one of the highlights of your movie is Jason Statham telling Post Malone (as a would-be robber) to—pardon my language—suck his own dick, then you’ve misunderstood the assignment.

Conclusion

Part of the appeal of Snatch and Lock, Stock was that they made the macho masculinity of the criminal underworld something worth cackling over, but Wrath of Man takes itself alarmingly seriously. Perhaps the past decade or so of working with big budgets and established commercial properties for companies like Warner Bros. and Disney has robbed Ritchie of his sense of daring; perhaps he’s too far removed from the streets to know what these characters should sound like any more. Either way, it’s a damn shame that Wrath of Man had to turn out this way. Perhaps Ritchie and Statham should shake hands and call it a day.

What do you think? Are you a fan of Ritchie and Statham’s previous collaborations? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Wrath of Man opened in the U.S. on May 7, 2021 and opens in the UK on July 23, 2021. You can find more international release dates here.

Watch Wrath of Man