Movie Breakdown: Wrath Of Man (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
This stage of Guy Ritchie’s career is absolutely baffling. Sure, he’s still cranking out choppily slashed crime flicks in his sleep but also clearly stretching his arms a bit with stuff like King Arthur (meh) and Aladdin (eh?). Wrath of Man finds him nestled back in the arms of crime and violence with his bestie Jason Statham and it has me at least interested.
Post-Screening Ramble:
There’s a thirty minute heist sequence/Jason Statham-led blood bath at the end of Wrath of Man that I firmly believe was the only thing Guy Ritchie wanted to do in this movie. He looked down at a script full of oddball characters and overly wrought back stories, saw this big ass violent denouement and was like, “I wanna do that.” And, really, that’s pretty much all Wrath of Man is. Jason Statham, a mysterious guy who can do a lot of bad stuff to people, joins a bunch of roughneck money truck security guys to help battle back the until now previously unknown daily attacks on armored cars. He’s got his reasons, and this film wants to slowly, slowly, slowly drag the reveal of those reasons before throwing up its hands and just having Statham kill people. There’s two acts of this film where Ritchie is setting up not only a bunch of fodder for Statham’s kill frenzy – Josh Hartnett in sleaze mode, Mindhunter’s Holt McCallany in faster-talking mode – but it’s a confusing and unnecessary narrative for a film as single minded as this one. It almost feels like Ritchie is trying to make sure everyone knows he’s still Guy Ritchie. There’s side characters with funny names; there’s fast edits and camera tricks; there’s nice font work on title cards, but none of it adds up to anything. It’s just window dressing for another subpar Jason Statham action flick – seemingly the comfort spot for Ritchie and Statham these days. Both can do better. I’m still waiting for them to do so.
One Last Thought:
Do armored cars really get robbed this much? Because, man, if so, I hope these armored truck security people are getting paid out the ass for what is clearly a job as dangerous as joining the military.
