These days, even the "James Bond" films try to leaven their inherited toxic masculinity with self-awareness and a competent female character or two; Eva Green and Judi Dench get to steal the occasional scene from Daniel Craig even if they don’t get the marquee. Guy Ritchie’s “Wrath of Man,” though, is wearisomely true to its title: Male anger is what it offers, and male anger — in all its predictably tedious humorlessness — is all it is interested in providing.
For longtime fans of Ritchie’s work, that means “Wrath of Man” will likely be a disappointment.
Since his early films like “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” Ritchie has always loved male-male bonding and off-color banter. But his best movies treat the testosterone action movie clichés that go along with those two things with a gleefully flamboyant insouciance. He shuffles chronologies and scrambles together narration and action sequences; he uses split screens just for the hell of it in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and even dumped a giant psychedelic snake into the Arthurian legend in “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.”
His irreverence can irritate some viewers — his "King Arthur" movie, for instance, bombed. But at least in a Guy Ritchie movie, you’re never bored.
f all you want in an action movie is some tough, manly guy racking up kills, maybe you’ll love this.
Unless, alas, that Guy Ritchie movie is “Wrath of Man.” The director’s latest film, based on the 2004 French heist drama “Cash Truck,” is another collaboration with his favorite leading man, Jason Statham, and a low point in both of their careers. There are no split screens; there are no giant snakes. Even Ritchie’s characters’ trademark loquaciousness is dialed down here to the occasional tired quip.
What’s left is, unfortunately, a straight action film with every iota of joy carefully wrung out.
Statham plays H, a crime kingpin whose son was accidentally murdered when another unknown group of crooks ripped off a Fortico cash truck. Bent on revenge, H signs on as a security guard at Fortico to find the person on the inside who helped the robbers and to enact a bloody and merciless revenge on whomever that is.
Statham’s performance is so unwaveringly flat it’s almost parodic: glare angrily; angrily glare; glare with anger.
If you’ve ever watched a Hollywood film before, you’ll probably be able to identify the traitor in the first half-hour, and you’ve probably already guessed the ending. Ritchie does use a lot of flashbacks and somewhat toy with the narrative structure to spice things up a bit, but it’s a pretty pallid effort. There isn’t even any interesting fight choreography in the few hand-to-hand combat scenes. The only surprise in the whole film is how blandly single-minded the movie is in its embrace of the unrelieved politics of masculine dominance.
The movie, obviously, fails the Bechdel Test: There is no scene in which two women have a conversation, much less in which two women have a conversation about something other than a man. In fact, women have almost no lines in the film at all. The world of security guards presented here is almost entirely male, and the Fortico employees demean each other by referring to each other as “ladies.”
Usually in a movie like this, the hero would be seeking revenge for the loss of a female significant other. But in “Wrath of Man,” H is already divorced, and he loses his son, sparing the creators from having to show the protagonist interacting with a woman affectionately. We see H’s wife, the mother of his son, only once, in a long shot in which her features are almost impossible to make out — as if the movie is embarrassed to have her deliver her lines. Her most memorable moment on screen is when she calls H a misogynist slur.
'Wrath of Man' is a straight action film with every iota of joy carefully wrung out.
There is also a female guard who instantly, inevitably, falls into H’s bed. Immediately thereafter he threatens her life — not to advance the plot but to reassure the viewers that their protagonist isn’t going to go all soft and treat the woman he just slept with like a human being.
Statham’s performance is so unwaveringly flat it’s almost parodic: glare angrily; angrily glare; glare with anger. Repeat for two hours. It’s like he’s trying to see if his face can be as immobile as a Batman mask.
Statham can be a charming actor and has been fun to watch in other Ritchie films — and you see a flash of that in the short flashback with his son, where he’s allowed to exhibit a modicum of warmth. But otherwise it’s all grim determination and stoic glower, all the time.
That stoic glower, of course, inevitably sweeps over the mounting piles of dead people. “Wrath of Man” is a body-count film, and few escape the carnage. You can’t exactly say the death toll means Ritchie has a bleak vision, though: Since “Wrath of Man” doesn’t bother to get you to care about anyone, the casualties carry little emotional weight. They are just there to show you how tough and unrelenting the movie is and how tough and unrelenting the protagonist is.
H isn’t morally superior to the bank robber he’s pursuing in vengeance. He’s a bank robber himself. And while those bank robbers murder people, so does he. He’s not even more likable than the bad guys, since he barely has a personality beyond his accent. We’re supposed to root for him not because he’s in the right or is appealing but simply because it’s an action movie, and he’s the character who’s best at action-movie-ing — the person with the most toxic masculinity in the room.
If all you want in an action movie is some tough, manly guy racking up kills, maybe you’ll love H and the way he glares at the bodies of people he’s either murdered or will shortly. But Guy Ritchie used to offer viewers more than that. “Wrath of Man” could have used a lot less wrath and a lot more imagination and heart.
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