File under: when a movie looks good and turns out to be bad.
BQB here with a review of Wrath of Man.
I love Jason Statham. Really. I’ve been hooked since his Transporter films.
I like Guy Ritchie though sometimes he is hit – Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and sometimes he is miss (King Arthur.)
With 2019’s The Gentlemen showing Guy Ritchie still had “it” and reuniting with Statham (also in LSTB), I thought this movie would be the bomb dot com but instead it’s the fizzle fo shizzle.
Why? It’s entirely too complicated, and unnecessarily so.
A good mystery can be fun…and oftentimes, when the mystery is too mysterious, I’ll suspend disbelief and nod and say to myself, “Yeah, I can’t really expend the mental energy needed to figure out if what everyone is doing/saying really does add up to X character being the culprit but I’ll smile and nod because overall this movie was fun.”
Just didn’t happen here.
Weird because the premise is cool and ironically, this is the most boring movie about armored car heists I have ever seen. Like, the bullets are flying and the bombs are exploding and I’m yawning because holy moly who cares.
Strangely, the premise is interesting. Fortico Security has had many of its armored trucks robbed as of late. Amidst this turmoil, Statham’s “Mr. H” is hired as a new security guard. The first ten-twenty minutes are a lot of exposition, presented badly, way too much telling and not enough showing, almost like one of those video games where your main character meets their BFF NPC who gives them a tour of the new digs and introduces you to everyone. Lame.
It starts to look like it might redeem itself when Mr. H’s truck is robbed and he displays some pretty badass skills against the robbers, kicking their butts easily and leaving everyone wondering how a poorly paid security guard can fight like a karate expert.
This is the grand question of the film and you watch and watch and watch as threads are pulled but never quite sewn back together. I waited for an explanation, weeding through possiblities like maybe he’s an undercover cop, maybe he’s a rival bad guy, maybe this, maybe that.
I never got the answer and ultimately had to google it to find out it’s in the middle of the film in a flashback that didn’t really seem like a flashback. It was a rather poorly placed flashback that seemed like part of the present if you ask me.
STATUS: Not shelf-worthy, a rating I rarely give but it truly did suck – which is surprising because it includes a director I like, a main star I like, as well as a cast I like, full of big names – Josh Hartnett, Holt McCallany, Jeffrey Donovan and so on. But hey, pizza is good and orange juice is good but mixing two good things doesn’t always mean the result will be good.
I wonder if maybe this is, to my knowledge and I could be wrong, Ritchie’s first film set in America. Maybe all his dialogue sounds better coming out of Brits but I don’t think so. His dialogue is usually more stylish than this. And while he is from that Tarantino-esque 1990s school of directors who like to put the end in the middle and the beginning at the end and the middle after breakfast, it was just too much complication without enough payoff.
Bookshelf Battle 