An Unsanctioned Kill

Guy Ritchie has a very specific kind of film he likes to make. He’s focused on the criminal world, the scum and villainy. His films tend to get their hands dirty, not so much revelling in violence and criminality but certainly focusing on the events that lead to darker paths. While has had some movies that venture outside of this sort of genre he’s created for himself, titles like Swept Away and Aladdin, more often than not he returns to the criminal world as a kind of comfort place for his filmmaking. Hell, even his films like Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword have those criminal, underworld elements worked in.

Generally audiences have reacted well to Ritchie’s works. While not every film has been a true winner – RocknRolla was an early failure in the director’s criminal underworld oeuvre, while many of his later works, like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare seem to have strayed too far from grounded criminality for audiences’ tastes – the director is an acknowledged master of the criminal action film. Certainly even his contemporaries that try to play in the same field, like Matthew Vaugh and his Layer Cake, haven’t been able to create their works with the same kind of aplomb.

He’s strong enough in the genre that I tend to take notice whenever another of his grounded criminal action films comes out. And yet, despite this, his 2021 film Wrath of Man somehow slipped under my radar. It wasn’t an unsuccessful film, making $104 Mil against its relatively modest $40 Mil budget (although it says a lot about Hollywood now that $40 Mil is “relatively modest”), and it paired Ritchie up with his long-time collaborator and star, Jason Statham. Somehow, though, this one slipped by, such that when Amazon PrimeWhile Netflix might be the largest streaming seervice right now, other major contenders have come into the game. One of the biggest, and best funded, is Amazon Prime, the streaming-service add-on packing with free delivery and all kinds of other perks Amazon gives its members. And, with the backing of its corporate parent, this streaming service very well could become the market leader. suggested it to be as a “recent release”, I didn’t even realize it was really five years old. Still, I was happy to see it show up, so I took a chance on it just to see what the film was like.

Wrath of Man focuses on H (Statham), a new hire at an armored truck transportation company who, clearly, has a dark past he prefers to keep hidden. We know, from the opening of the film, that the company, Fortico Security, had been hit a few months prior by a coordinated team of robbers. The attack left two guards, and an innocent bystander, dead, and the company was shaken by what happened, upping their internal security. H slips in and proves to be a solid, dependable asset, especially when another crew comes to rob a truck H is guarding and he easily dispatches them all.

Hailed as a hero, H is easily able to work his way up through the company. But the whole time he’s there he’s studying everyone, keeping an eye on everything. He’s not just working for the company, he’s working it over with one goal in mind: figuring out if there’s an inside man at Fortico that helped the original robbers and, if so, who that inside man might be. He wants to know not because he’s a good guy, though. No, in fact H is really a criminal mastermind himself, and he would have robbed Fortico first, except he was beaten to the punch. And when the robbery happened, the guys killed his kid, the one innocent murdered at the scene. Now, H wants his revenge.

Wrath of Man is a definite swerve for Ritchie. While many (really, most) of his films are about criminals and the underworld they live in, he generally directs films about made men with hearts of gold. Sure, they’re bad guys but they aren’t really bad guys. Wrath of Man isn’t really the same. H might have some moral convictions, and he knows there are guys out there worse than him and his crew, but he’s also a cold-blooded killer who doesn’t really care about most of humanity. They can live or die, so long as the jobs he pulls are done cleanly.

This forces the film to take some narrative jogs to keep us invested in H and his quest for vengeance. We don’t open with H, instead seeing the armored truck robbery that sets the events in motion. Then, as if this were a Quentin Tarantino film (although, I would argue, done better), we bounce forward and backwards in time to see H, get invested in who he is, and then learn who he was before the inciting incident that left his son dead. The film wraps in and around itself to keep you guessing, which isn’t a bad thing, but it does this because if you knew who H was from the outset you’d think him as bad as everyone else, and then you wouldn’t be able to root for him.

H, which stands for Patrick Hill, is actually a criminal boss, who, for years, ran a crew in Los Angeles. He did have his limits (such as not getting into white slavery, especially not with underage girls) but we get the vibe that he was a bad man who did bad things so he and his men could get paid. Certainly the FBI isn’t entirely happy to have him out on the streets, on a quest for revenge, and there are brushes between him and the G-men that color in some past. However the only reason we can like him is because we know there are worse men out there, and, per the film’s logic, sometimes it takes a killer to catch a killer.

Helping to sell this is Statham. This is one of his darker movies, where the actor gives a performance that lacks much of his normal bright personality and shining charisma. Statham is a solid actor, and he plays H very well. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s an against-type performance since he’s played plenty of criminals before, mostly for Ritchie. Still, though, this isn’t your standard Statham character, and I think plenty of people would be turned off by his character and this performance because of that.

Similarly, I think the movie might be too dark for some audiences to enjoy. A very bad man hunting down worse people is a story that won’t jive with everyone. Sure, the film did fairly well, but I could see how if the tone were a little brighter, if H were a little less dark and brooding, maybe the film could have done even better. That said, I think it would have compromised Ritchie’s vision, and I respect the writer/director for going all in and wallowing in this world of darkness and evil.

Wrath of Man isn’t for everyone, but I do think it's one of Ritchie’s stronger films. It shows the director’s aplomb behind the camera while giving us a tale that isn’t another repeat of everything he’s done before. It’s different and darker than the director normally produces, but that is actually to the film’s credit. It might not be for everyone, but those that can, get through it will see the director firing on all cylinders, exploring the genre he helped perfect. It’s good when a director is willing to step outside their normal works and, with how this film plays out, it does feel like Ritchie pushed himself. That makes for a stronger film, even if not everyone will enjoy it.