Beginning with its self-consciously biblical title, Guy Ritchie’s Wrath of Man feels like an attempt on the filmmaker’s part to invest one of his customarily sprawling crime capers with newfound severity—and, for a while, it exudes the pared-down sense of purpose that one often associates with classic crime cinema. For starters, the film’s opening is among the best sequences of Ritchie’s career so far, in which the robbery of an armored cash truck in Los Angeles is staged from one fixed point in the rear of the vehicle. Rather than springing the usual balls-to-the-wall pyrotechnics, Ritchie ingeniously exploits a limited vantage point, making it seem as if we’re crouched in the car while god knows what is transpiring. Ritchie’s willingness to squander all sorts of potential money shots, and to take the largely unseen violence quite seriously, suggests a stylistic rebirth for the director.
This sense of (relative) minimalism extends to Wrath of Man’s entire first act, a slow burn in which we’re introduced to the inner workings of a cash truck company. In this film’s world, the trucks are seemingly breached or knocked off daily, and so the characters speak of potential attacks as one might the weather. The labyrinthine firm that owns the trucks suggests a gene splice of a warehouse, prison, and army barracks, and its pumped-up guards very much resemble soldiers, allowing Ritchie to indulge his taste for macho locker-room bickering, some of which is quite funny. The constant anticipation of crime has made these people as twitchy and crazy as the hotheads of earlier Ritchie films, and they also have similarly lurid nicknames. Into this world walks a new guard who’s quickly nicknamed H (Jason Statham) and who’s shown the ropes by Bullitt (Holt McCallany). While many guards revel in their bravado, particularly Boy Sweat Dave (Josh Hartnett), H and Bullitt exude the quiet, no-bullshit authority that indicates true power, especially in boys-will-be-boys crime films.
Statham and McCallany are as well-matched as their characters. Statham turns his famous taciturnity into a quiet, volatile comedic routine, moving fast and speaking briefly and slowly, while McCallany, a taller, beefier man, moves with deliberation and speaks much more and with greater speed and sense of accommodation. For a while, you may find yourself hoping that Wrath of Man will be nothing more than a study of these characters, with H adjusting to the security firm and Bullitt leading him around and befriending him over beers and billiards while the threat of potential hijacking looms. That would not only be a truly different Guy Ritchie movie, but an altogether more adventurous form of aspiring summer blockbuster, suggesting the looser, knottier American crime films of the 1960s and ’70s.
But a huge and luxuriously mounted collaboration between Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham will, of course, have a plot, which in this case consists of the usual heists and revenge and ultraviolence. H is soon revealed to have prodigious skill with a gun after he brutally dispatches a group of robbers who kidnap Bullitt—a sequence that’s as distinctive as the film’s opening, as Ritchie utilizes a series of long shots and once again takes the violence quite seriously, allowing H to be cold-blooded rather than serving as an agent of audience gratification. However, this scene also marks the beginning of Wrath of Man’s slide into routine, as H’s skill set is soon explained with a series of flashbacks and flashforwards that are nearly as gratuitously showy as the chronological hopscotching of Ritchie’s The Gentlemen.
Like that film, Wrath of Man remains noteworthy for Ritchie’s increasing confidence behind the camera, and especially for the design porn that’s become a staple of his cinema. With the possible exception of Christopher Nolan, no other filmmaker likes men in expensive clothes as much as Ritchie. In a scene that’s theoretically supposed to be about the death of a pivotal character, H wears a tight beige jacket that convincingly positions Statham as the second coming of Steve McQueen. Later, a group of bad guys invade the security firm wearing body armor so streamlined that it causes them to resemble metallic insects—a weird touch that informs the rote, over-complicated climax with a bit of authentic eeriness. But these touches only punctuate an increasingly cluttered plot, as cacophony eventually takes over Wrath of Man in the tradition of many Ritchie films, stranding the actors in the process. Except, that is, for Statham, who’s by now a master of presiding over Ritchie’s gleeful chaos.
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