Mark Reviews Movies: WRATH OF MAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 6, 2021

The final 30 or so minutes of Wrath of Man definitely don't leave us wanting more. Everything before that section, though, leaves us wanting a bit less.

The plot here, which comes from the 2004 French movie Le Convoyeur (which didn't receive a release in the United States), is fairly typical—an intersection of a revenge thriller and a heist story. One wouldn't guess that, though, from the enigmatic and drawn-out first and second acts of director Guy Ritchie, Marn Davies, and Ivan Atkinson's screenplay.

It all begins with the robbery of an armored truck, seen entirely from the interior of said vehicle. The guards in charge of the truck are killed in the heist, as is an unseen and unidentified person not associated with the robbery.

For a lengthy period of time, the movie simply offers up little pieces of information—new details that reveal the full extent of who was killed, how that person is connected to our protagonist, and what the robbers' next plan is. It's a complicated puzzle of pure exposition, and the question is whether or not anything else Ritchie does here is worth the shifting perspectives, the narrative's back-and-forth chronology, and the constant overlapping of key details.

A few months after the opening robbery (which we see again and again from different points of view, although the only important changes involve seeing new faces or making a connection to recognizable characters), a mysterious man known only as "Hill" (Jason Statham), who gets the nickname "H," applies for and gets a job as a guard with the armored truck company that was robbed. H is a man of few words and little patience, and we're quickly reminded of Statham's most notable qualities as an actor and an action star.

He plays tough and silent with the best of them, but it never feels like an act. Statham doesn't just put on a scowl and glare with a hard-edged stare. There's always a sense of something stewing beneath the surface, as if he's walking container of potential energy, just waiting to explode into violence.

He does here, of course, and multiple times. The first comes on one of his jobs, collecting millions of dollars from some casino or bank or something, when his boss Bullet (Holt McCallany) is taken hostage by some thieves. The truck driver—who's called "Boy Sweat" Dave (Josh Hartnett), because it almost seems like an insult among these characters not to give someone a nickname—wants to follow procedure and drive back to the depot. H is having none of it. The bullets fly and blood erupts freely, as our strong, silent anti-hero dispatches the would-be robbers without breaking a sweat, missing a step, or even show any sign that all this violence means a thing to him.

There's a reason H took this job, is so quick on the trigger, looks at his co-workers with some suspicion, and gets information about all of them from a mysterious woman who seems to have access to any information he needs. There are also a couple of mysterious federal agents, who report to their mysterious boss (played by Andy Garcia) that they recognize H and don't know why he's doing this job.

Everything gradually but eventually comes to light, as we learn H's motivations for his multi-layered deception and figure out the identity of the civilian who was murdered in the opening robbery (We'll keep it a secret here, although there are really only two or three potential candidates for a revenge story, anyway). None of it is a surprise, and neither is the lengthy section when we get to see the lives and plans of the team of thieves, led by Jackson (Jeffrey Donovan) and getting into more trouble on account of violent wildcard Jan (Scott Eastwood). They're all bored and disgruntled military veterans looking for thrills and a retirement plan.

The screenplay assumes far too much that all of these gradual revelations are enough to compensate for the absence of almost anything else within this story and about these characters. When the whole picture of H's background, motive, and plan comes together, there's no shock or sense of completion, only an empty feeling that Ritchie thought so highly of this winding-and-weaving dump of exposition and of the rough-and-tumble banter between all of these groups of characters.

As for the ultimate destination of this shallow and overly-convoluted story, though, that's a different story. Once all of the pieces—a bunch of conflicting goals, meeting at one familiar location—and players—H, the robbers, an inside man—are in place, the screenplay abandons all of its pretenses and just lets a particularly impressive action sequence unfold, uninterrupted, for about 20 minutes. Ritchie stages it with such precision, such clarity, and such complete control that we wonder where this filmmaker has been for everything preceding it. We know what everyone wants, where everyone is at any moment, and how the plan is proceeding or failing at every step (The sequence is intercut with the robbers going through the mission).

The payoff to Wrath of Man, in other words, is so effective and dynamic that it's almost worth forgiving how long, how repetitive, and how hollow the build-up to it actually is. It's almost to that point, but not quite.

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