Confession time: I am not a fan of Guy Ritchie’s style or storytelling, at least in his crime thrillers. So keep that in mine… I’m so not the target audience when I say that I was deeply bored, distracted, and annoyed while sitting through Wrath of Man.

Jason Statham plays a new hire at an armored truck company in LA. It seems crooks have started picking out the company’s vehicles and they need more protection and Statham comes with references, even if he just barely passes the tests. But when a gang tries to take his truck on the first run, to absolutely nobodies surprise, Statham does a Statham and all the baddies wind up efficiently dead. Who is this man? Let’s flashback and see!

I’ll give the movie this much credit: it isn’t like every other Guy Ritchie crime caper. He’s reigned in his wild editing and nutty characters to tell a more grounded story and I like that much about the film. Plus the cinematography and some nice long takes are good (in fact, the opening take felt so unlike the hyperkinetic editing Ritchie often uses, I thought I was watching someone else’s movie). And the final action shootout is pretty slickly put together. Didn’t care about anyone, but as pure manic action, it’s pretty good.

The score deserves its own paragraph. Very cool, very deep, driving ominous music plays throughout. It does have the habit of edging on droning, like a lot of Hans Zimmer scores for Nolan flicks, but it was pretty cool and added oomph and heft and a mood to the scenes.

So what went wrong? Well… gosh… how about having a movie with characters. I don’t really even mean likable characters, though we do lack those too. These aren’t people, they are stock characters who are defined pretty much by tough guy talk and bad jokes. Since I don’t care about anyone, why should I care about anything happening? It doesn’t help that nobody in the movie is a good person (which isn’t necessarily a crime) but also nobody is worth rooting for even as an anti-hero.

The flick doesn’t seem to know who the audience should root for… Statham the sociopathic robot man? The crooks with their risky heist? The randomly strewn about other guards at the truck company? I don’t know… I didn’t care for any of them… and it doesn’t help Statham seems to vanish from long stretches of the movie so even his bullet-headed glower doesn’t seem to be the star of the show.

The movie also thinks that we’re supposed to be surprised by Statham turning out to be a bad-ass killer… and if they’d hired a dozen other actors, that might have come as a nice surprise. But Statham is Statham and Statham is gonna Statham. We are then treated to elaborately long flashbacks that are meant to reveal what’s going on… and they just serve to confirm what we’ve already figured out or reveal different perspectives on the same events that are hardly revelatory.

So this flick just didn’t work for me and I’m not too surprised. If you like tough guy heist movies that exist only to show slickly filmed gunfights with no real interest in character development, then you might like this flick. I want and need more… and it’s not like this movie is unique in the genre of action flicks. Plenty of others (including plenty other Statham flicks) eschew the plot for the shooty shoot. It’s just not my jam so take this overly long review with a grain of salt. What do I know?

Score: 70