'Wrath of Man' Does Not Produce a Righteous Moviegoing Experience

"You promised if I did all the driving you'd talk to me! Otherwise I'm gonna fall asleep!"

It's a weird time to be reviewing movies, even weirder than it was a year ago, at the beginning of the pandemic. Back then, there really wasn't any doubt about going to movie theaters since the vast majority were closed. Streaming was it. But now, a year later, theaters are opening back up, and films are getting exclusive theatrical releases again. But despite being fully vaccinated, I remain cautious, and I think it would take something a bit more...epic than Guy Ritchie's Wrath of Man to get me back into a theater full of popcorn munchers right now. (I watched a streaming version for this review.)

That said, I cannot deny that action movies are best viewed on a big screen, and perhaps viewing from the comfort of my couch can partially be to blame for my almost falling asleep at times, though I think it's the redundancy of the plot, and its ultimate shoot-out, which sure does drag on (the movie runs over two hours), that is really to blame for that. 

A remake of the 2004 French film Cash Truck, Wrath of Man stars Ritchie regular Jason Statham as the mysterious new driver, known only as "H," at an armored truck company. Just why he chose to join the company a few weeks after a deadly robbery, and who he may actually be, is the mystery that grounds the first 30 minutes or so of the film, before it begins to jump around in time and we learn what his real motives are.

I'm a Jason Statham fan, and have watched plenty of terrible movies merely because he was in them. He's his usual steely jawed and deadpan self here and...that's about it. The script doesn't give him many of his reliably witty retorts, and his fighting is relegated to expert marksmanship alone. There's not much in the way of punching or high kicks to his enemies' heads here. Which, trust me, I get! The man is in his fifties now. But without either of those things, he's just a waste in a film that doesn't offer much else to make up for it.

And at times, Wrath of Man is almost amateurish. There's some shockingly bad dialogue throughout, some of it delivered by equally shockingly bad American accents from such Brits as Eddie Marsan and Darrell D'Silva. (Statham, thankfully, sticks to his cockney growl, although more than once I was wishing for subtitles.) Also, Statham's character is given a son who, who because of unfortunate casting, appears to be entering college at the age of 30?

The terrible dialogue doesn't help the performances of some normally solid actors, like Holt McCallany, Jeremy Donovan and Josh Hartnett. Ironically, this theatrical release is exactly the kind of movie you'd usually find on some streaming service when looking for something, anything, new to watch. You'd start it because of the Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham name recognition...and then probably turn it off half way through because you're sure there's just got to be something better on.