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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