What s it worth, Anna?
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Based on the 2004 French film Cash Truck, Wrath of Man is co-written and directed by Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; Sherlock Holmes; The Gentlemen) and follows H (Jason Statham), a mysterious man who takes a job with an armored truck company. When his truck is held up at gunpoint, H efficiently dispatches the assailants. Who is this guy? We learn his son was murdered in a similar robbery, and he s using his position with the trucking company to find the killers. (118 min.) click to enlarge
MYSTERY MAN In Guy Ritchie s
“This is a creaky old dinosaur. This girl should have been retired 10 years ago.”
That’s a doomed security guard talking about a weather-beaten armoured car in the latest bloody action film from Guy Ritchie. But it’s also an easy opening for Ritchie and actor Jason Statham to flex their ageing chops, as if to say, “Hey, there’s some life in us yet!” And by the end of this nearly two-hour crime drama, a remake of the 2004 French thriller “Le Convoyeur,” the director and star, both in their 50s, seem reinvigorated, albeit at a slower and more effective pace than one might expect.
WRATH OF MAN: 3.5 STARS “Wrath of Man,” a remake of Nicolas Boukhrief’s 2004 French film “Le Convoyeur,” is a revenge heist flick that sees director Guy Ritchie reunited with his trademarked tricky storytelling style, Jason Statham, and the ruthless violence that made his early movies such eye poppers. Statham plays “’H’, like in bomb,” a man of few words with a mysterious past – big surprise there. They should call him Gazpacho because he is the coolest of cool cucumbers. No matter what, this guy’s pulse rate never rises above 50 beats per minute. When we first meet him, he takes a job as a security guard for Fortico, a Los Angeles armored car company. A recent robbery left three people dead and made the surviving guards edgy and uneasy. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this job can be?” a coworker named Boy Sweat Dave (Josh Hartnett) asks him. “We ain’t the predator, we’re the prey.”
Wrath of Man Overreaches But Lands Some Jabs Along the Way
The action and cast are good enough even if it s surprisingly flat for a Guy Ritchie/Jason Statham collaboration.
Miramax
The term auteur doesn’t get tossed around much in relation to
Guy Ritchie, but it’s hard to argue that the bulk of his filmography feels, well, Ritchie-esque. Think eccentric characters, quippy dialogue, sharp action, and an inconsistently successful sense of humor. When it all comes together we get films like
Snatch (2000) and
Revolver (2005) was aiming for. All of this is to say that his latest,
Wrath of Man, is an action thriller that, if you didn’t already know it was directed by Ritchie you wouldn’t know it was directed by Ritchie.