Wrath of Man

A star vehicle for Jason Statham at his meanest, “Wrath of Man” is one of Guy Ritchie’s bestdirected movies—and one of his most surprising, at least in terms of style and tone. Gone is the jumpy, busy, light-hearted, buzzed-bloke-in-a-pub-tellingyou-a-tale vibe of films like “Snatch”, “RocknRolla”, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E”, “King Arthur”, and the like. In its place is voluptuous darkness, so sinister that you may wonder if its main character is the devil himself. This character is named Patrick “H” Hill (one letter removed from “Hell”). His coworkers at Los Angeles’ Fortico armoured car company call him “H”, which sets him up to be sort of a Kafka character, a nearly nameless cog in a societal machine. H is a rookie on the job. He reads as a surly, socially inept, uncommunicative lumphe barely passes the driving and shooting tests, and his resting face is somewhere between brooding and seething—but his supervisor Bullet (Holt McCallany) hires him anyway because beggars can’t be choosers. Morale has been low ever since a daylight heist became a bloody public shootout that claimed multiple lives, including two Fortico guards. Adapted from the 2004 French film “Le Convoyeur” (aka “Cash Truck”), and borrowing the basic outline of the story, “Wrath of Man” is a timeshifting neo-noir crime thriller, filled with tough, sometimes violent men: gangsters and former combat veterans, mostly, with a smattering of security guards and cops. Ritchie and co-screenwriters Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies suggest that H could belong to any of those groups, or might be something else entirely. We instantly suspect he’s not the man he claims to be even if we haven’t seen the trailer (in H’s very first scene, somebody says his name and he replies a half-second later than he should). Then the film lets a couple of major characters suspect the same thing, and then a couple more, until it becomes a regular topic of discussion at Fortico, along with jokes about somebody on the team being an inside man for armoured car robbers (which seems plausible, given how often their trucks are attacked). From there until a third of the way through the story, Ritchie and Statham treat H as a blank screen upon which the imagination can project scenarios. We wonder who H really is and what he actually wants. And we wonder whether his precise response to another heist-shooting a bushel of robbers singlehandedly while crooks use Bullet as a human shield and H’s partner, Boy Sweat Dave (Josh Hartnett) sits in the driver’s seat of the armoured car, paralysed with fear-is a harbinger of heroic deeds to come or the opening salvo in an inside-man strategy that will reveal H as a monster of greed and bloodlust.

The completeness and sureness of the movie’s aesthetic is a joy to behold, even when the images capture human beings doing savage things. You don’t really root for anyone in this film. They are criminals engaged in contests of will. But the film is not a value-neutral exercise. There is an undertone of lament to a lot of the violent action. Every character made their bed and must lie it. More often than not, it’s a deathbed.