Try-hard tale incurs only wrath
A smart audience will cotton on immediately that Jason Statham’s brooding ‘‘Patrick Hill’’ is not even close to being the washed-up everyman he is pretending.
Wrath of Man (R16, 118 mins) Directed by Guy Ritchie Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★
Here’s a quiz: Let’s pretend you are the manager of a Los Angeles-based armoured truck company. You have recently lost two of your finest to a hold-up, and the assailants are still out there on the loose.
They also must have had some inside knowledge to know what truck to hit and exactly where it would be.
So, a complete stranger walks into your office and applies for one of the newly open positions.
His CV and background all check out, as long as you only look online and don’t do anything oldfashioned, like, for instance, picking up the telephone and actually talking to someone.
He seems nice enough, despite having the cold and emotionless eyes of a real-estate agent.
Do you ask him to wait, while you run a few more checks? Tell him to hoof it, because he gives everyone in the building the screaming creeps?
Or do you immediately promote him to the front seat of a truck, give him a gun and a badge and say ‘‘good luck sunshine, try to bring her home in one piece’’?
If your answer was the latter, congratulations.
You are just what Guy Ritchie is hoping his audience will swallow, in this new, unheralded and needlessly complicated Wrath of Man.
Ritchie’s latest – after 2019’s enjoyably daft The Gentlemen –isa remake of the French Le Convoyeur (Cash Truck), which Hollywood has been threatening to Americanise pretty much ever since its 2004 release.
A smart audience, even one that hasn’t seen the hysterically overinformative trailer, will cotton on immediately that Jason Statham’s brooding ‘‘Patrick Hill’’ is not even close to being the washed-up everyman he is pretending.
Instead, he might just be some sort of insider with a dubiously acquired set of skills that will somehow make him a one-man match for any militarily trained pack of villains that Ritchie’s oddly inert and pointlessly non-linear script can throw at him.
At which point, we should at least be able to sit back, inhale our popcorn and enjoy a couple of hours of Statham doing what he does best, with Eddie Marsan, Niamh Algar, Andy Garcia and the great Holt McCallany (Mindhunter) all coming off a deep bench in support.
But, nah. Wrath of Man is a film that tries way too hard to ‘‘mean something’’, when it had the potential to be a perfectly enjoyable load of violent nonsense.
Ritchie forgets to throw in the jokes and gags that are his signature and, instead, goes for a sulky-faced seriousness that doesn’t suit him, Statham or even the script.
Even the film’s justification for how Statham came to be wronged by the villains in the first place is a gaping and distracting hole in a plot that is already over burdened with murky events and far too many interchangeable characters.
Wrath of Man is, maybe, Ritchie’s latest attempt to get out of medium-budget jail after the expensive and gargantuan flop of his King Arthur in 2017.
If so, I reckon he should stick to what he’s great at and go back to the breezy London-set knockabouts that are his natural home.
Leave the world of armoured car heists in LA to Christopher Nolan and Michael Mann, neither of whom could tell a joke if their lives depended on it.