WRATH OF MAN review: Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham reunite for a grim heist thriller

After their breakthrough team-ups on Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, filmmaker Guy Ritchie and star Jason Statham are back with Wrath of Man, a testosterone-fuelled, heavy-handed new heist thriller.

Statham stars as Patrick Hill (or “H” as he’s cleverly nicknamed), a mysterious and quiet man who applies to work at Fortico Security, a company responsible for trucking around millions of dollars of cash per day. He just barely passes the truck driving and shooting tests, to the satisfaction of his on-job supervisor “Bullet” (Holt McCallany).

As we quickly learn (and most of the audience will have immediately expected), Hill is not the milquetoast employee he’s posing to be. On his first run as a transporter (had to get that in there), H’s truck is held up by a gang of robbers. Instead of giving up the millions in the truck to save the life of his new co-worker, H calmly and methodically shoots down each and every one of the assailants, including a defiant Post Malone.

While H is being celebrated by his fellow security grunts and an extremely enthusiastic Fortico owner (played by a bizarrely cheerful Rob Delaney, who seems to get how ridiculous the role is), we learn the true motivation for H’s new job. H is out for revenge after his son was killed in a similar armoured truck hold up, and he’s on the hunt for the man that pulled the trigger.

Ritchie’s characteristic visual flair is mostly absent from Wrath of Man, which is more or less a straightforward action thriller in the Christopher Nolan / Tony Scott mold. Like those filmmakers, Ritchie treats this story very seriously, from the crisp and efficient shooting style to the almost total lack of humour (apart from a few homophobic jokes that somehow manage to slip into every single Ritchie movie).

That’s not to say that Wrath of Man isn’t entertaining — combined with Chris Benstead’s very Hans Zimmer-like score, Ritchie expertly ratchets up the tension throughout the film as we uncover H’s true past and how he plans to hunt down and punish his son’s killer. Ritchie employs some clever storytelling techniques to do this, including jumbling up the timelines and showing the central truck attack from multiple points of view throughout the course of the film.

Statham is one of our great action stars (and has proven just as adept in recent comedic turns) but he isn’t given that much to do here. He mostly just scowls and quickly pops off an endless number of headshots. That stone-faced demeanor may be due to H’s intense feelings of guilt and remorse, but it zaps Statham of both his action-hero bona fides and his great comic timing.

While the film’s labyrinthian storytelling and grim revenge plot keep things moving along, the film’s laughably bad dialogue and a number of inept performances keep Wrath of Man from reaching the heights Ritchie seems to be aiming for here. (An eye-rolling conversation between two security goons about coffee makers seems like it was plucked directly from an SNL sketch about bros trying to act like actual humans.)

Based on Nicolas Boukhrief’s 2008 film Le Convoyeur, Wrath of Man is an idiosyncratic and grim revenge thriller that nonetheless remains a riveting watch. There are some dumbfounding writing and acting choices here, but there’s an undeniable primal enjoyment from watching Jason Statham violently take down a huge array of scumbags. Wrath of Man could have used some of Ritchie’s patented stylistic choices or some jokes that didn’t feel like they were written by 12-year-olds, but as a pure genre exercise, this delivers the goods.

Wrath of Man is in select theatres now.