Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham made their names together in the late 1990s, then went their separate ways. Wrath of Man is the fourth time they have worked as director and lead, and the first since Revolver in 2005. It is also the coldest film either of them has made. The tagline promises “A one man army.” What the film delivers is closer to a man doing paperwork between killings.
Trailer, via Amazon MGM Studios.
Patrick Hill Joins Fortico Security
The setup is lean. Five months after an armored-truck robbery in Los Angeles leaves two guards and a bystander dead, a quiet man named Patrick Hill takes a job at Fortico Security. He barely passes firearm training. His new colleagues treat him as dead weight. Company trainer Bullet, played by Holt McCallany, takes a liking to him anyway.
Then a pickup goes wrong. Bullet is taken hostage, and Hill kills the robbers with expert marksmanship. The crew that hired him starts asking where he came from. So do the FBI, who work out his real identity. Their superior, Agent King, tells them to leave Hill alone, to their confusion.
That is the first act, and it is the best one. Ritchie shoots the robbery with no music and no jokes, just noise and bodies. Statham does almost nothing for the first stretch, which is the point.
Four Acts, Two Timelines
Wrath of Man is told in four acts and jumps backward without warning. The second act, titled “Scorched Earth,” goes five months back to the day of the opening robbery. Hill is there. He is a thief, working with a robbery crew, and he has brought his son Dougie along. He leaves the boy in the car while he monitors an armored truck’s route.
A different crew hijacks the truck across from Hill’s car. Dougie is shot dead. Hill is shot too, but he sees the murderer’s face. He wakes in a hospital, where Agent King hands him a list of suspects and agrees to look away while Hill hunts them. Hill is Mason Hargreaves, not merely a thief but a crime lord, and he is promised he can avenge Dougie if he brings down everyone involved.
The structure is the film’s whole idea and also its problem. The reveal that Hill is a criminal lands well. The reveal that he is a crime lord lands softer, because the film has not built a world big enough to hold one.
He is Mason Hargreaves, not just a thief but a notorious crime lord
Statham and the Supporting Crew
Statham has played this role before, but rarely this still. He has maybe forty lines in the first hour. When he finally speaks at length, the film relaxes, and you feel how much it was holding back.
McCallany is the best thing in the supporting cast. Bullet is a talker, a company man, and his scenes with Statham carry a warmth the rest of the film refuses. Josh Hartnett shows up as Boy Sweat Dave and gets the few jokes that survive. Jeffrey Donovan plays Jackson, Scott Eastwood plays Jan, and Andy García appears in a cameo as Agent King.
The film also stacks its bench with faces you do not expect. Post Malone turns up as a truck robber. Rob Delaney plays Fortico’s CEO, Blake Halls. Alex Ferns, Niamh Algar and Tadhg Murphy play guards Sticky John Williams, Dana Curtis and Shirley Davies. Eddie Marsan is Terry, Chris Reilly is Tom, Laz Alonso is Carlos, Raúl Castillo is Sam, DeObia Oparei is Brad, Rocci Williams is Hollow Bob.
None of them get enough time. The four-act structure keeps cutting away just as a character starts to matter.
A Heist in Chinatown
The third act brings Hill and Bullet back into the line of fire during a heist in Chinatown. The robbers see Hill and run. They seem to know him. That single beat does more work than any shootout in the film, and it is over in seconds.
Ritchie has always been good at menace. Here he is good at silence. The problem is what surrounds it. Wrath of Man runs 119 minutes and spends long stretches on logistics, on files, on Hill reading a dossier of Fortico employee files and an autopsy report. Some of that is texture. Much of it is stalling.
The film is loosely based on the 2004 French film Cash Truck, and it keeps that film’s bones while adding a revenge spine. The result is a thriller that knows exactly what it is doing in individual scenes and is less sure across two hours.
What Wrath of Man Gets Right
The action is clean. Ritchie stages gunfights without the choppy editing that usually passes for intensity, and he lets the camera sit still while people die. Statham is credible as a man who has done this before. The score stays out of the way.
What the film lacks is a reason to care past the premise. Dougie’s death is the engine, and it is handled in a few minutes of screen time. Hill’s grief is stated more than shown. By the time he takes his “dramatic and irrevocable steps,” the film has spent more energy on the mechanics of revenge than on the man carrying it out.
The four-act structure is a real choice, not a gimmick, and it earns the mid-film reveal. But it also means the film keeps restarting. Each act has to rebuild momentum. The Chinatown sequence is the only one that lands at full force.
This is a better film than the reunion suggests and a lesser one than its best scenes promise. Ritchie and Statham still fit. The screenplay, by Ritchie with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, gives them a cold, precise machine with a hollow center. The cast is deep enough to fill that center, and the film mostly does not let them.
Wrath of Man is worth watching for McCallany, for the Chinatown heist, and for the sight of Statham doing less than he has in years. It is not worth watching for the answer to who H is. The film tells you, and the answer is less interesting than the question.
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