Guy Ritchie knows how to make his characters stylish even when they’re wearing a bathrobe.
REPPED: The opening banter between the characters is a lot of fun. There are plenty of people who don’t enjoy Ritchie’s macho dialogue but I’m one of the few guys who do. It’s nice to see a bunch of blue collar guys and gals breaking each other’s balls; you rarely get that with most movies now. Granted, the dialogue isn’t well-written and it’d fit right in with a Schwarzenegger-led action film, but that’s exactly why I liked it so much. In fact, Wrath of Man should have had more of that dynamic going on because the actual plot itself is an absolute slog.
NEGGED: What could have been a straightforward action movie turns out to be a narratively convoluted mess that had no reason to be. It’s typical Guy Ritchie to have his movies jump back and forth in time but it serves absolutely no purpose to a film like Wrath of Man. The only thing the time jump does is add to the runtime and remove any sort of tension because we’re now watching two different films altogether. No one, with the exception of Jason Statham, have any real personality so it’s baffling that Wrath of Man would add more characters and backstory instead of focusing on the characters we had at the start.
FINAL VERDICT: Wrath of Man focuses too much on the things it shouldn’t and less on the things it should. The film starts out promising enough with an introduction resembling Michael Mann’s Heat and some banter that’s both funny and cheesy. As it progresses, Wrath of Man slows down a bit too much by going into extreme detail about Statham’s backstory and backstory of the robbers who killed his son. The third act is what Wrath of Man should have been from the beginning, but its unnecessary use of time jumps ultimately makes Wrath of Man kinda fun, kinda boring, and completely forgettable.
The Cinebuff 