Any half-decent action movie needs to make the stakes of its bloodshed clear. A single nameless goon is about as threatening to John Wick as a sickly puppy is to you, whereas much of the appeal of watching a thriller like Heat is in seeing how two equally deadly forces attempt to outmaneuver each other. This sliding scale of lethality informs an action movie’s tone and tenor, which is what made it so interesting when, five years ago today, Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham dropped a terminator into a world of would-be badasses.
In Wrath of Man, Statham, brace yourself, is out for revenge, but he’s seeking it in a world full of posturing macho men who have their own violent ambitions and nary an idea that a true killer walks among them. Patrick Hill (Statham) has joined Fortico Security because, as we later learn, his son was murdered during a messy armored truck robbery, and Hill believes they had help from an inside source. He investigates his new co-workers while waging a one-man crusade against truck robbers, impressing some at Fortico and alarming others.
