UK cinema’s biggest geezers go back to basics in this gung-ho thriller
Wrath of Man
15 cert, 158 min
★★★★★
Dir Guy Ritchie Starring Jason Statham, Eddie Marsan, Holt Mccallany, Niamh Algar, Josh Hartnett, Kyle Eastwood
GGuy Ritchie has binned any pretence at subtlety. It’s a bullet-strewn romp
uy Ritchie and Jason Statham haven’t worked together since 2005’s Revolver, in which Statham played a monosyllabic bruiser who let his fists do the talking. Ritchie has gone on to make films about King Arthur and Sherlock Holmes, and to direct a blue-skinned Will Smith in a reboot of Disney’s Aladdin. Statham, meanwhile, is still playing monosyllabic bruisers who let their fists do the talking. And, as British cinema’s ultimate geezers reunite for heist thriller Wrath of Man, it is that hardman aesthetic rather than Ritchie’s jackdaw filmmaking style that comes out on top.
Rough at the edges and with a propensity for cartoonish violence, this is an action caper hewn in the image of its star. It’s a remake of 2004 French drama Le Convoyeur, about a man who extracts revenge against a criminal gang after they take something precious from him during an armed robbery. However, it abandons that film’s noir stylings in favour of a crash-bang-wallop tempo that harks back to Ritchie’s early days as the Statham-assisted hardman auteur behind Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. And which, if at first enjoyably pugilistic, turns formulaic as the story cranks its way to a denouement full of popping pistols and devoid of wit or colour.
Statham plays Patrick Hill, a Brit in LA who is introduced interviewing for a job with Fortico Security, a firm that moves cash deposits around the city.
His CV is solid but his firearm skills appear at best adequate. So it comes as a surprise to his co-workers when he casually shoots dead a clutch of robbers during a raid (including one played incongruously by Gen Z rapper Post Malone). There is more to this brusque baldie than meets the eye.
Statham powers through Wrath of Man like a bulldozer rolling downhill. And the rest of the cast, which includes Holt Mccallany from Mindhunter, Niamh Algar and Josh Hartnett as fellow security guards, and Andy García as an FBI agent, are canny enough to step out of his way and let him get on with killing people. The only ones apparently having any fun are Eddie Marsan as Hill’s boss (he appears to be enjoying trying an American accent) and comedian Rob Delaney, who knows he’s in a cheesy action excursion and is suitably over the top as Fortico’s owner.
Ritchie borrows a trick from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs by dividing the movie into chapters and flipping backwards and forwards through time. And as it does so, Hill’s mission of vengeance eventually draws him into the orbit of a group of US military veterans who feel abandoned by their government and decide to take matters into their own hands.
They’re misguided rather than actively wicked, with the exception of a bad apple played with a psychotic simmer by Kyle Eastwood (who, like his father, Clint, is becoming a better actor with age). A less gung-ho director might have spent more time with these disillusioned grunts, collateral damage in America’s doomed campaign in Afghanistan.
But, with Statham literally riding shotgun, Ritchie has binned any pretence at subtlety, and goes back to basics with a bullet-strewn romp that kicks down the door first and asks questions later. And which is, in the end, nothing more than an excuse for its star to punch as many villains as possible.
On Prime Video now