Into this world walks a new guard who’s quickly nicknamed H (Jason Statham) and who’s shown the ropes by Bullitt (Holt McCallany). The constant anticipation of crime has made these people as twitchy and crazy as the hotheads of earlier Ritchie films, and they also have similarly lurid nicknames. The labyrinthine firm that owns the trucks suggests a gene splice of a warehouse, prison, and army barracks, and its pumped-up guards very much resemble soldiers, allowing Ritchie to indulge his taste for macho locker-room bickering, some of which is quite funny. In this film’s world, the trucks are seemingly breached or knocked off daily, and so the characters speak of potential attacks as one might the weather. This sense of (relative) minimalism extends to Wrath of Man’s entire first act, a slow burn in which we’re introduced to the inner workings of a cash truck company. Ritchie’s willingness to squander all sorts of potential money shots, and to take the largely unseen violence quite seriously, suggests a stylistic rebirth for the director. Rather than springing the usual balls-to-the-wall pyrotechnics, Ritchie ingeniously exploits a limited vantage point, making it seem as if we’re crouched in the car while god knows what is transpiring. For starters, the film’s opening is among the best sequences of Ritchie’s career so far, in which the robbery of an armored cash truck in Los Angeles is staged from one fixed point in the rear of the vehicle. Beginning with its self-consciously biblical title, Guy Ritchie’s Wrath of Man feels like an attempt on the filmmaker’s part to invest one of his customarily sprawling crime capers with newfound severity-and, for a while, it exudes the pared-down sense of purpose that one often associates with classic crime cinema.
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