Wrath of Man: The Expensive Price Tag of Ego

Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham team up again, this time, with a mind-blowingly, non-sensical and ultra contrived collection of random set pieces. Hang on to your hats friends, not because the film is mind blowing, but because it’ll blow your mind as to how this film got the greenlight in the first place.

How and for what?

I normally appreciate Ritchie’s films. While never lacking in toxic masculinity and bigotry, in the past, he has pulled some pretty incredible, large cast, scripts together through ingenuity and hard work.

With yet another star-studded cast, I can’t for the life of me figure out what attracted A-listers to this script. Maybe they signed on just for Ritchie’s reputation, without seeing a script at first.

H (Statham) is a seemingly average guy (yeah right) who applies to work for a large armored truck company. But as expected in any Statham film, he secretly has a past and present that have trained him with “special skills” that make him inherently invincible and make the bad guys bow to his presence. Through several flash forwards and backs, we come to understand that H picked this place for a reason.

Earlier in the timeline, H’s son Dougie (Eli Brown) gets ambushed by a gang of narcissistic sociopaths, who bushwhack an armored car loaded with cash. Both H and Dougie just happen to stop right in front of the group posed as construction workers and H leaves his car and Dougie to walk around the corner to a food truck.

Why H didn’t pull up right where the food truck was versus walking a block away, only makes sense if lazy scriptwriting needs a convenient place to isolate the son. Here, again, for some reason, one of the criminals shoots and kills Dougie, leaving it open for H to seek revenge.

Source: MGM

In All Honesty…

Wrath of Man is a harsh reminder to me why I usually, exclusively review independent films.

I’m purposely leaving this review short because I refuse to waste my time delving into a film that had minimal to no heart put into it.

Wrath of Man was painful to watch. It is another example of a filmmaker with privilege using his status to push through a shoddily thrown together script and spending reckless amounts of money on something with no heart or point.

I’ve never seen a studio level film with a script that was so bad that even A-list, legendary actors couldn’t do anything with it. The, usually, exceptional ensemble that Ritchie gathered was completely lost and wasted on this.

With the exception of Statham, who plays the same character in every movie he does, I could actually see the actors acting while they helplessly floundered through the excruciatingly awkward dialogue.

It felt like I was watching a rehearsal of the first draft of the script, with explosions added. Roughly edited with a sub-par grasp on story, character and plot, and wholly implausible American accents from the UK actors, Wrath of Man plods awkwardly along with no rhyme or reason. It still has Ritchie’s signature toxic masculinity and bigotry but with none of the purposeful dialogue or ingenuity.

But this is far from the first time that studios have allowed a privileged, white male get away with wasting millions of dollars on an ego trip, though.

This is an ongoing problem that Hollywood continues to flaunt in our faces and, by the looks of the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, people are lapping up the excrement with glee. It proves that the Hollywood elite can continue to defecate onscreen and audiences will continue to pay to see it.

As long as that continues to happen, we will see no change in the industry as a whole. It’s truly heart breaking to witness when there are so many talented people out there with far better ideas and scripts that will, most likely, never be made.

We, however, will continue to be a voice against this blatant corruption, greed, elitism and waste with everything we’ve got. Until film and filmmaking has integrity, heart and true diversity, we won’t stop.