Wow, when this thing eventually curdles, it really curdles into something rank.
Wrath of Man, a Jason Statham vehicle directed by Guy Ritchie, begins as a fairly clever (if agonizingly macho and predictably homophobic) riff on the heist flick. Statham’s “H” is a new hire at an elite Los Angeles armored-car company. A bit on the older side and having barely passed his training exams, H surprisingly reveals lethal skills when he fends off a crew of would-be thieves (including Post Malone!) during an early robbery attempt. Surely there must be more to H’s past?
Oh, there is, and to reveal it Wrath of Man nearly tosses Statham aside for a significant chunk of its running time. Instead, we take a timeline-deconstructing detour into the sort of criminal world that Ritchie’s worst movies inhabit—this one with heinous dollops of torture and underage pornography. By the time H returns and the story picks up where it left off, the life has been sapped out of you and you could care less about how the final act—involving another heist—unfolds.
As always, Ritchie teases you with his talents as a filmmaker. The opening scene, of another robbery attempt on an armored car, unfolds entirely from the vantage point of a fixed camera in the back of the vehicle, an ingenious example of withholding visual information to generate suspense. And Statham—whose movies I enjoy more often than not—is as coiled as ever (if not really allowed to indulge his comic chops). Why Wrath of Man—juvenile stuff that gets unnecessarily dark—decides to take that detour is beyond me. And, thankfully, behind me.
