Wrath of Man
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Two of the last six movies I’ve seen in a movie theater were made by Guy Ritchie. He really straddled the pandemic.
The last one was The Gentlemen, a crime story pastiche, told out of order, that felt like a mediocre greatest hits of its auteur. As I’m wont to do, it provides an interesting counterpoint to his latest, Wrath of Man, starring Jason Statham as a mysterious new employee for a cash truck company.
It is pretty easy to categorize Wrath of Man as Ritchie doing Heat, putting it squarely into the post-Heat crime film genre that has really boomed the past few years (Den of Thieves as the flag bearer). These films tend to overcomplicate underground crime and its major players. Cops and criminals become fully fledged characters with tragedies and philosophies on their place in the struggle that is life. Wrath of Man replaces the usual cop angle with a security company who move millions of dollars around Los Angeles every day, becoming natural targets for syndicates with extraordinarily complex heist plans, the stuff movies are made of.
Where The Gentlemen and Wrath of Man align the most, and what differentiates the latter within the Heat playbook, is the out-of-time storytelling. Unfortunately, it feels like a gimmick, useful in obscuring the plot to provide twists that couldn’t have occurred if the story was told in order. This also contributes to the film being a full two hours long, which is unnecessarily bloated.
Doubly unfortunate, another major marker of this new subgenre is they tend to be absolutely humorless, Wrath of Man fits right in there. This was probably the biggest surprise for me, considering Ritchie and Statham working together again. Statham isn’t unfamiliar with break neck, straight-faced actioners, hell he built much of his career on it, but his more recent turns have unlocked more tongue in cheek behind that straight face. His natural bad ass charisma is able to come through regardless, even though he seems to be taking the direction of being as still as humanly possible.
The cast around Statham is a who’s who of movie masculinity, highlighted by Holt McCallany, the work mentor for Statham, and Jeffrey Donovan as the captain on the criminal side, a group of disillusioned veterans who miss the thrill of the mission and the waning respect they’ve been given for their service. Josh Hartnett and Scott Eastwood give the counterbalance roles, providing the color in the film, though not so much as to be comic relief. Hartnett is another coworker who stands in as a seemingly tough guy who can’t actually stand up to the heat. Eastwood is the typical wild card of the criminal group, the kind of guy who spends too money and tends to make mistakes when pressure is on. He probably won’t work for everyone, especially how big he goes from what surrounds him, but it is the first Eastwood performance that has worked for me at all - I tend to find him a black hole.
As I’m writing this review, I can’t help but think that I might be coming off more negative than the experience I had in the theater. Maybe that is that I’m still a bit in the glow of the theater experience and this is a great kind of movie to see in the theater. There is a lot of action and it is competently made. The structure, while a problem with the film, requires heavy engagement to keep up. There are still a few minor points of the story that greatly confused me and probably would have more greatly taken me out of the experience with easy distractions.
One final thing definitely holding Wrath of Man back is one of the more unfortunate aspects of its director: it is incredibly problematic at times. Especially in the first 20-30 minutes of the film, where it is getting acclimated into the world of this security company, there is so much homophobic attitude that it wouldn’t be surprising if the script was written in the 90s. There isn’t anything explicit necessarily, but there is a lot of dudes being dudes and putting each other down or riling each other up by mentioning gay relationships. Strangely, these attitudes happen throughout the definite best parts of the film, before it becomes burdened by its structure. But not entirely surprising from Guy Ritchie.