The Doctor’s Diagnosis: A-
As a general rule when seeing a remake, I try to watch the original first. Wrath of Man is a remake of a 2004 French film titled Cash Truck (or Le Convoyeur, in whatever language the French speak) and, as best as I can tell, this movie is frigging impossible to find in the United States. I spent hours checking my usual sources, both legitimate and shady, and couldn’t find it. I couldn’t even find a DVD that isn’t region-locked. So if anyone can point me in the direction of finding a copy of this film, I would greatly appreciate it.
In retrospect, maybe it was for the best that I couldn’t find Cash Truck. Had I seen the original, I probably would have been less surprised while watching Wrath of Man. Based on the trailers, I was expecting a fairly standard Jason Statham revenge flick filled with Guy Ritchie’s usual assortment of sophisticated smartasses. I was wrong. Wrath of Man is a surprisingly dark and effective crime thriller. While I categorized Ritchie’s last film The Gentlemen as a nearly desperate and cliched attempt to recreate the style of crime films of the late 90s/early 2000s, Wrath of Man is the real deal and a solid return-to-form for both the director and the star.
I’m going to be light on plot details because this is an easy film to spoil. We know from the trailers that Statham plays a very dangerous man that takes a job with an armored car company, seemingly just to wait for robbery attempts so that he can fuck people up. The motivation for this, and the nature of his character in general, is a mystery for a good portion of the non-linear storytelling in the film. I’ve grown tired of non-linear storytelling because it is now often little more than a gimmick, but it serves a narrative purpose here. The slow reveal of Statham’s background, as well displaying a key event from multiple perspectives, creates a legitimate sense of mystery to the film that would have been ruined with a narrative structure. This is highly effective and transforms what could have been a very routine thriller into an entertaining jigsaw puzzle of a movie. By the end, it’s hard to tell if there really even is a good guy in the film as my initial expectations were subverted by clever screenwriting.
Considering the reunion of Statham and Ritchie, the film is also surprisingly grim. Statham does not play his usual wise-cracking hero, the tone is more dramatic than usual action fare and even the (rather excellent) musical score is more ominous than bombastic. If you are expecting the over-the-top mayhem of John Wick or Nobody, then you will be disappointed (or at least surprised, as I was). Instead, the film is more evocative of something like Heat in its portrayal of shitty people living shitty lives and the consequences thereof. Statham doesn’t even fight anyone, which has to be a frigging first. The violence is more realistic and (for the most part) taken quite seriously. The end result is a film that’s far more dramatically effective and suspenseful, though less fun, then its audience may expect.
I do have a couple of quibbles. The dialogue, particularly early in the film, can be a bit cringe-inducing. The characters are mostly a bunch of hardasses and their lines don’t so much sound like how tough guys talk, but rather like how somebody thinks that stereotypical tough guys would speak to each other. Imagine if the cast of Predator was just constantly calling each other gay and you’re in the ballpark of what I mean. The film is also a bit long, particularly with the extended shootout in the final act, and would have been much tighter with maybe 10 minutes removed for pacing. However, it never dragged to the point that I was checking my watch.
Wrath of Man didn’t deliver the manic action film that I was expecting, but I instead got one of the best crime dramas that I’ve seen in years. It’s not another Crank or Transporter, thankfully, but closer to the bastard child of early Mann crossed with early Tarantino. Now I really need to track down the original….this is the kind of thing that will weigh on my mind until I see it.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrath_of_Man#/media/File:Wrath-of-man.jpg
3 replies on “Wrath of Man”
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