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Featuring Jason Statham at his most menacing, “Wrath of Man” is one of Guy Ritchie’s best-directed films—and one of his most surprising, at least when it comes to style and tone—and one of the best-acted films of the year. The jumpy, busy, lighthearted, buzzed-bloke-in-a-pub-telling-you-a-tale vibe of films like “Snatch,” “RocknRolla,” “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” “King Arthur,” and the like has been replaced by a more serious, serious-but-lighthearted vibe. Instead, you’ll find voluptuous darkness, which is so sinister that you’ll wonder if the main character is actually the devil himself!
Patrick “H” Hill is the name of this character (one letter removed from “Hell”). When his coworkers at the Fortico armored car company in Los Angeles refer to him simply as “H,” he is set up to be something of a Kafka character, a nearly nameless cog in a larger societal machine. H is a newcomer to the company. Because beggars can’t choose their employers, Bullet (Holt McCallany) hires him despite the fact that he appears to be a surly, socially inept, and uncommunicative lump. He barely passes the driving and shooting tests, and his resting face is somewhere between brooding and seething. Since a daylight heist turned into a bloody public shootout that claimed the lives of multiple people, including two Fortico guards, morale has been low on the job.
A time-shifting neo-noir crime thriller, “Wrath of Man” is loosely based on and borrows the basic outline of the 2004 French film “Le Convoyeur” (also known as “Cash Truck”). The film is filled with tough, sometimes violent men: gangsters and former combat veterans, for the most part, with a smattering of security guards and cops thrown in for good measure. H, according to Ritchie and his co-screenwriters Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, could be a member of any of the aforementioned groups, or he could be something entirely different. Even if we haven’t seen the trailer, we have a strong suspicion that he is not the man he claims to be (in H’s very first scene, someone calls his name and he responds a half-second later than he should). In the following scenes, the film allows a couple of major characters to suspect the same thing, and then a couple more, until the subject becomes a regular topic of conversation at Fortico, along with jokes about someone on the team being an inside man for armored car robbers (which seems plausible, given how often their trucks are attacked).
Up until about a third of the way through the story, Ritchie and Statham treat H as a blank canvas on which the audience’s imagination can paint scenarios. We’re left scratching our heads, wondering who H really is and what he really wants. H is a monster of greed and bloodlust, and we wonder whether his precise response to another heist—shooting a bushel of robbers by himself 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 first salvo in an inside
The film then transports us to a different time and place, and 15 minutes later, to yet another time and place, and so on, always providing us with additional information about H that will almost certainly negate whatever impression you had of him previously. In this case, it is less of a self-consciously clever Quentin Tarantino-Guy Ritchie maneuver and more in the poker-faced, unironic spirit of classic older films that inspired them, such as “The Killing” and “The Killers,” as well as “Criss Cross” and “The Killers” (another armored car-focused crime thriller, remade by Steven Soderbergh as “The Underneath”). To avoid giving anything away about the twists that I found delightful (even when I should’ve predicted them), let’s just say that each narrative shift (heralded by a white-on-black chapter title) broadens the movie’s scope 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.
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The fact that H has a personal reason for what he’s doing at Fortico is not a spoiler; every one of his actions, no matter how ill-advised, contributes to his mission, whether he’s baiting a coworker at a bar, intimidating another employee at gunpoint into answering some questions, or staring just a little too long at the wall of ID badges where Fortico employees clock in and out isn’t either. It is impossible to tell whether or not H chose his cell phone’s ring tone as a sample from Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkryies,” but there is no indication that he did so out of amusement. He has the appearance of a guy who laughed four times in the 1990s before deciding that it wasn’t for him.
Clint Eastwood’s hero-turned-horror-movie-stalker characters appear in the film’s presentation of H; these are the characters who left a bitter aftertaste in the mayhem of “Dirty Harry,” “High Plains Drifter,” and “Pale Rider” before vanishing into thin air. The only time he appears to be truly happy is when he is torturing or killing someone he believes deserves to suffer, and even then, he does not appear to be content. Based on what we learn about him, he appears to be motivated by a code of conduct and a sense of duty rather than by the raw emotions that he should be experiencing.
This strong Eastwood vibe makes the decision to cast Eastwood’s son Scott in the role of a snotty psycho named Jan appear to be a critical commentary on the history of cinema. In the younger Eastwood’s on-screen presence, Ritchie may be the first director to recognize something uniquely malignant in the actor’s demeanor, which is reminiscent of his father’s in the pre-Spaghetti Western era, before he figured out how to be a star. In addition to oozes of spoiled entitlement, Jan’s smirky, gum-chewing, rebellious-without-a-grief shallowness is a central component of his vileness. He’s the kind of crook who, after a heist, is specifically warned not to spend any money on himself, but then goes out and buys himself a loft apartment and a $28,000 bike, and then acts surprised when a colleague calls him out on it.
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He’s just another snake in the rat-infested snake pit. There are three or four major characters in this film who you might consider saving from a house fire if you were in their shoes. H and Jan aren’t on the list, for whatever reason. Boy Sweat Dave, the ex-mercenaries Carlos (Laz Alonso), Sam (Raul 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 learns that H is tearing through the underworld and decides to stand back and let him do his thing, are also not in on the action. His words are a paraphrase of one of the most famous lines from the similarly vile thriller “Man on Fire,” in which the vigilante hero is described as “Creasy’s art is death, and he’s about to paint his masterpiece”: “Let the painter paint,” says the narrator.
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It’s possible that the blood-painter H has become so captivating—the kind of driven, merciless antihero who keeps you guessing as to whether he even has a soul to lose—that when “Wrath of Man” leaves him to flesh out the other characters, they fall short because their badness is too visible to be taken seriously. You can find them begging for money, demanding respect, complaining about being bored and in need of something to do, and so on. As opposed to H., they do not walk into the room and bring the odor of sulphur with them.
For a role that is innately ridiculous, you need the right actor to play it. Statham is the man. Despite his lad-movie background, he’s always been a more versatile and game leading man than his lad-movie resume might suggest—whether he’s clowning around in “Spy,” playing wisecracking Ahab to a giant prehistoric shark in “The Meg,” or embarking on a blood-soaked spiritual odyssey in Guy Ritchie’s shoot-’em-up parable “Revolver,” he’s always had that
There aren’t many adjectives to describe his performance here. It’s a nouns-and-verbs-only star turn in the vein of Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson in Sergio Leone’s Westerns and Takeshi Kitano’s yakuza films from before the millennium. When H’s office manager, Terry (Eddie Marsan), describes the new guy as “colder than a reptile,” it appears to be an understatement of the truth. In order to amplify Statham’s choices, Ritchie and cinematographer Alan Stewart treat his shaved dome and wood-carved face as sinister art objects, concealing his eyes in shadow as H processes bad news, and giving his noggin the Colonel Kurtz globe-of-doom treatment.
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More than in any other Ritchie film, you can sense the presence of Evil in this one, and not in the “bad guy does bad things while laughing” sense, but in the capital-E, mythological or biblical sense, soul-rotting and innocence-killing sense. It is not a horror film, but it is in the same genre as horror films. Several shots are taken from the perspective of a man dressed in riot gear who is going on a killing spree, his labored breathing amplified by plexiglass and rubber. The film “Wrath of Man” could be shown as part of a double feature with Guy Ritchie’s “Revolver.” In one of them, Statham portrays a morally compromised character whose soul is on the verge of being extinguished. His character in the other is one who has progressed to the point where the affront that sets off his rampage is seen less as an inexplicable catastrophe and more as karmic retribution for the toxic energy he has pumped into the world over a period of time.
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Godzilla’s prowling and planning are accompanied by a minor-key, seven-note theme by composer Christopher Benstead, which would be perfect for shots of Godzilla’s dorsal fins cutting through the waves. A brilliant piece of music scoring that expresses a truth about H better than any dialogue could ever hope to do so. In the sequences where Ritchie cuts to helicopter shots of armored trucks and getaway vehicles making their way from point A to point B, Benstead’s motif is repeated with variations until it appears to be an incantation summoning evil forces.
The film’s stripped-down, almost elemental energy is perfectly complemented by Ritchie’s direction. As is always the case in a Ritchie film, there is some magisterial cross-cutting (by James Herbert), but it never feels cluttered or overly showy; rather, it is more about the inevitability, even fatefulness, of the forces that these characters have unleashed in the first place. It’s one of those tour-de-force heist-exposition adventures where the exposition and the heist are folded together, and the movie keeps cutting from toy vehicles on a diorama to real vehicles on the street in the final third.
However, the most memorable scenes are shot in a straightforward manner by Ritchie’s standards, frequently in a single take, with the camera gliding from character to character as they move through spaces and converse. I enjoy watching a maximalist pare down his life in this way, keeping things simple except when he needs to be a wizard who can be everywhere at the same time.
Even when the images depict human beings engaging in savage behavior, the completeness and certainty of the film’s aesthetic is a pleasure to behold. In this film, you don’t really root for any of the characters. They are criminals who engage in will-power competitions. The film, on the other hand, is not a value-neutral exercise. Throughout much of the violent action, there is an undercurrent of melancholy. Every character has made their bed, and now they must lie down in it. The majority of the time, it’s on a deathbed.
The film is currently showing in theaters.
For more personality quizzes check this: In The Heights Quiz.
