A star vehicle for Jason Statham at hismeanest,“Wrath of Man” is one of Guy Ritchie’s best-directed movies—and one of his most surprising, at least in terms of style and tone. Gone is the jumpy, busy, lighthearted, buzzed-bloke-in-a-pub-telling-you-a-tale vibe of film 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 armored car company call him “H,” which sets him up to be sort of a Kafka character, a nearly nameless cog in asocietal machine. H is a rookieon the job.He reads as a surly, socially inept, uncommunicative lump—hebarely 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 sincea 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 atime-shifting 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 suggestthat H could belong to any of those groups, or might be something else entirely. We instantly suspect he’snotthe man he claims to beeven if we haven’t seen the trailer(in H’s very first scene, somebody says his nameand he replies a half-second later than he should). Then the filmlets 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 armored 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 screenupon which the imagination can project scenarios. We wonderwhoH really is and what he actually wants. And we wonderwhether his precise response to another heist—shooting a bushel of robbers singlehandedly while crooks use Bullet as human shield and H’s partner, Boy Sweat Dave (Josh Hartnett) sits in the driver’s seat of the armored car, paralyzed 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.
Then the movie takes us to a different time and place; and then, 15 minutes later, to another time and place; and then another, always giving us additional information about H that will likely negate whatever take you had. This is less of a self-consciously clever QuentinTarantino-Guy Ritchie maneuver, and more in the poker-faced, un-ironicspirit of classic older films that inspired them, like “The Killing” and “The Killers” and “Criss Cross” (another armored car-focused crime thriller, remade by Steven Soderbergh as “The Underneath“). To avoid disclosing twists that delighted me(even when, in retrospect, I should’ve seen them coming) let’s say that each narrative shift (heralded by a white-on-black chapter title)widens the movie’s focus, until it becomes a panorama of sleaze and cruelty, democratically distributing its attention among a roster of men with faces that Humphrey Bogart could’ve punched.
It’s not a spoiler to say that H has a personal reason for what he’s doing at Fortico, and that every one of his actions, no matter how seemingly ill-advised, contributes to his mission, whether he’s baiting a coworker at a bar, threatening another employee at gunpoint into answering somequestions, or staring just a bit too long at the wall of ID badges where Fortico employees clock in and out. His cell phone’s ring tone is a sample from Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkryies,” and there’s zero indication that H picked it because he thought it was funny. He looks like a guy who laughed four times in the 1990s and decided it wasn’t for him.
There’s a touch of Clint Eastwood’s hero-as-horror-movie-stalker characters in the film’s presentation ofH—the ones that that gave the mayhem in“Dirty Harry,”“High Plains Drifter,” and “Pale Rider” a bitter aftertaste. He’s never really happy unless he’s torturing or killing somebody that he thinks deserves to suffer pain, but even then, he doesn’t seem happy. He seems driven by a code and a sense of duty rather than by the raw emotions he ought to be feeling, based on what we come to know about him.
The Eastwood vibe is so strong that it makes the decision to castEastwood’s son Scott as a snottypsychonamed Jan seem like critical commentary on cinema history. Ritchie might be the first director to find something uniquely malignant in the youngerEastwood’s screen presence, which isreminiscent of his dadin the pre-spaghetti Western era, before he figured out how to be a star.Jan oozes fratty entitlement, and hissmirky, gum-chewing, rebel-without-a-grievance shallowness is central to hisvileness. He’s the kind of crook who is specifically warned not to buy anything expensive after a heist, then getshimself a loft apartment and a $28,000 bike andseems offended when a colleague calls him out.
He’s just one more snake in the snake pit. There are three, maybe four major characters in this film that you’d briefly consider saving from a house fire. H and Jan aren’t on the list. Nor are Boy Sweat Dave or theex-mercenaries Carlos (Laz Alonso), Sam (Raúl Castillo) and Jackson (Jeffrey Donovan, whose decadent Mercury astronaut handsomeness is chef’s-kiss perfect), or a mysterious law enforcement bigwig known only as The King(Andy Garcia) who finds out that H is tearing through the underworld and decides to stand back and let himdo his thing. “Let the painter paint,”he says, echoing one of the most quoted lines from the similarly nasty thriller “Man on Fire,” describing its vigilante hero:“Creasy’s art is death, and he’s about to paint his masterpiece.”
If there’s a problem with the movie, it’s that the blood-painterH is so mesmerizing—the kind of driven, merciless antihero who keeps you guessing as to whether he even has a soul to lose—that whenever“Wrath of Man” leaves him to flesh out the other characters, they can’t measure up because their badnessis too legible. They want money, they want respect, they’re bored and need something to do, etc. They don’t enter the room and bring the smell of sulphur with them, like H.
You need just the right actor for such an innately ludicrous part.Statham is it. He’s always been a more versatile and game leading man than his lad-movie resume might indicate—whether he’s clowning it up in “Spy,” playing wisecracking Ahab to agiant prehistoric shark in “The Meg,” or embarking on a blood-soaked spiritual odyssey in Ritchie’s shoot-’em-up parable“Revolver,” he’s always got that economical, Old Hollywood movie star work ethic, givingviewers the information theyneed at the moment when they need it.
There aren’tmany adjectives in his acting here. It’s a nouns-and-verbs star turn, like Eastwood and Charles Bronson in Sergio Leone’s Westerns, and Takeshi Kitano in his pre-millennia yakuza pictures. When H’s office manager, Terry (Eddie Marsan), says the new guy is “colder than a reptile,” it seems like anunderstatement.Ritchie and cinematographer Alan Stewart amplify Statham’s choices by treating hisshaved domeand wood-carved face as sinister artobjects, hiding his eyes in shadow as H processes bad newsand giving his noggin the Colonel Kurtz globe-of-doom treatment.
More so than any other Ritchie film, you feel the presence of Evil in this one, in the capital-E, mythological or biblical sense, soul-rotting and innocence-killing, not “bad guy does bad things while laughing.” It’s not a horror film, but it’s horror-film adjacent. There’s even a shot from the point-of-view of a man in riot gear on a killing spree,his labored breathing amplified by plexiglas and rubber.You could show “Wrath of Man” as part of a double feature with Ritchie’s “Revolver.” In one,Statham plays a morally compromised character whose endangered soul might still be saved. In the other, he plays a man who’s so far past that point that the affront that triggers his rampage plays less as an inexplicable catastrophe than as karmic payback for thetoxic energy he’s pumped into the world.
Composer Christopher Benstead backs the film’s prowling and plan-making with a minor-key, seven-note theme that would be perfect for shots of Godzilla’s dorsal fins cutting through waves. It’s a brilliant bit of scoring that expresses atruth about H better than dialogue could. When Ritchie cuts to helicopter shots of armored trucks and getaway vehicles driving from point A to point B, Benstead’s motif repeats with variations until it seems like an incantationsummoning dark forces.
Ritchie’s direction suits the movie’s stripped-down, practically elemental energy. As is always the case in a Ritchie picture, there’s somemagisterial cross-cutting (by James Herbert), but it never feels busy or showy; it’s more about the inevitability, fatefulness even, of the forces that these characters have unleashed. The final third is one of those tour-de-force adventures inheist exposition where the exposition and the heist are folded together, and the movie keeps cutting from toy vehicles on a diorama to real ones on the street.
But the most memorable scenes are shot rather plainly by Ritchie’s standards, often in a single take, the camera gliding from character to character as they move through spaces and talk. It’s fun to watch a maximalistpare back like this, keeping it simpleexceptwhen he needs to be a wizard who’s everywhere at once.
The completeness and surenessof 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 madetheir bed and must lie it. More often than not, it’s adeathbed.
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