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.
Unusually for Ritchie, who made his name with gangster action-comedies and has since served as a reliable mercenary hand on broad blockbusters like Aladdin and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Wrath of Man is pitch-dark. Featuring four acts with Sturm und Drang subtitles like “A Dark Spirit” and “Scorched Earth,” and rarely getting wittier than when Statham responds to Post Malone’s “suck my dick” with “suck your own dick” before shooting him in the face, Ritchie’s grim script and careful attention to behind-the-scenes detail elevate the world of truck security to near-Shakespearean tragedy.
The result is a movie that’s kind of a commentary on the emptiness of tough-guy masculinity and kind of a commentary on how cool Jason Statham is. Wrath of Man never squares the circle, but the attempt is certainly intriguing. Told in a non-linear fashion that slowly spools out more information on Hill and the crew he’s hunting, the parts that veer off into the Los Angeles underworld buckle under the weight of overwrought self-seriousness reminiscent of Revolver, Ritchie’s bizarre 2005 bomb. The closest Wrath gets to suggesting that there’s something wrong with Hill’s bloody rampage is when it costs him his marriage, but that doesn’t stop him from being framed like the poster man for alpha male memes in most of his scenes.
But while some critics dismissed Wrath of Man as mindless and glib, every non-Statham character who tries to man up and be a head-popping hero not only gets themselves killed, but usually gets other people killed too. Hill’s son is only murdered because a guard gets a jolt of adrenaline and tries to be the Jason Statham he thinks he can be. Every other guard who talks themselves into fighting impossible odds is soon killed for it too, and once the inside man is revealed, it turns out there’s not a long lifespan in being the traitor who thinks he’s clever either. Fortico’s paper-pushing manager, the only man who senses that Hill is a terrifying sociopath rather than a badass to be celebrated and emulated, is also one of the few characters who doesn’t die for someone else’s money.
As for the thieves, they turn out to be Afghanistan vets struggling to find work. They say they’re only taking up armed robbery to provide for their families, but it soon becomes clear that they miss the thrill of planning, operating, and, in some cases, killing. Given how little Afghanistan and Iraq penetrated American pop culture, it’s interesting to see Richie portray their leader (Jeffrey Donovan) as an affable husband and dad in one scene, and a man talking about acceptable civilian casualties in the next (notably, Richie would soon return to Afghanistan with The Covenant, about the plight of abandoned translators). It’s not exactly The Deer Hunter, but it’s not a movie with nothing on its mind.
All of this makes Wrath of Man feel like John Wick crossed with Heat, to neither element’s benefit (the disconnect partially stems from the fact that Wrath is a loose remake of the less Statham-y 2004 French film Le Convoyeur). A midsection where Statham really Stathams it up is the weakest, but the final heist is so tense and visceral that it’s more than worth the sometimes meandering wait. It’s enough to make you wonder what Ritchie could accomplish with a more straightforward take on the heist genre.
As it stands, Wrath of Man is a warning that no amount of testosterone-laced bluster will turn you into Jason Statham. There’s only room for one Statham in any story, and odds are, you ain’t him. The gangsters in John Wick are terrified to know that John Wick is lurking out there, but it’s even scarier to realize that while you’re not the untouchable badass you thought you were, someone else is. Because by the time you’ve come to that realization, it’s already too late.
Wrath of Man is streaming on Netflix.
