To avoid disclosing twists that delighted me (even when, in retrospect, I should've seen them coming) let's say that each narrative shift (heralded by a white-on-black chapter title) widens the movie's focus, until it becomes a panorama of sleaze and cruelty, democratically distributing its attention among a roster of men with faces that Humphrey Bogart could've punched. This is less of a self-consciously clever Quentin Tarantino-Guy Ritchie maneuver, and more in the poker-faced, un-ironic spirit of classic older films that inspired them, like " The Killing" and "The Killers" and "Criss Cross" (another armored car-focused crime thriller, remade by Steven Soderbergh as " The Underneath").
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Then the movie takes us to a different time and place and then, 15 minutes later, to another time and place and then another, always giving us additional information about H that will likely negate whatever take you had.
And we wonder whether his precise response to another heist-shooting a bushel of robbers singlehandedly while crooks use Bullet as human shield and H's partner, Boy Sweat Dave ( Josh Hartnett) sits in the driver's seat of the armored car, paralyzed with fear-is a harbinger of heroic deeds to come, or the opening salvo in an inside-man strategy that will reveal H as a monster of greed and bloodlust. We wonder who H really is and what he actually wants. Then the film lets a couple of major characters suspect the same thing, and then a couple more, until it becomes a regular topic of discussion at Fortico, along with jokes about somebody on the team being an inside man for armored car robbers (which seems plausible, given how often their trucks are attacked).įrom there until a third of the way through the story, Ritchie and Statham treat H as a blank screen upon which the imagination can project scenarios. We instantly suspect he's not the man he claims to be even if we haven't seen the trailer (in H's very first scene, somebody says his name and he replies a half-second later than he should). Morale has been low ever since a daylight heist became a bloody public shootout that claimed multiple lives, including two Fortico guards.Īdapted from the 2004 French film "Le Convoyeur" (aka "Cash Truck"), and borrowing the basic outline of the story, "Wrath of Man" is a time-shifting neo-noir crime thriller, filled with tough, sometimes violent men: gangsters and former combat veterans, mostly, with a smattering of security guards and cops. Ritchie and co-screenwriters Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies suggest that H could belong to any of those groups, or might be something else entirely. H is a rookie on the job. He reads as a surly, socially inept, uncommunicative lump-he barely passes the driving and shooting tests, and his resting face is somewhere between brooding and seething-but his supervisor Bullet ( Holt McCallany) hires him anyway because beggars can't be choosers. His coworkers at Los Angeles' Fortico armored car company call him "H," which sets him up to be sort of a Kafka character, a nearly nameless cog in a societal machine. This character is named Patrick "H" Hill (one letter removed from "Hell").
Gone is the jumpy, busy, lighthearted, buzzed-bloke-in-a-pub-telling-you-a-tale vibe of film like " Snatch," " RocknRolla," " The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” " King Arthur," and the like. In its place is voluptuous darkness, so sinister that you may wonder if its main character is the devil himself.
A star vehicle for Jason Statham at his meanest, "Wrath of Man" is one of Guy Ritchie's best-directed movies-and one of his most surprising, at least in terms of style and tone.
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