Maybe it was only a matter of time before Nicolas Boukhrief’s 2004 movie, Le Convoyeur, was bound to be remade. Called Cash Truck en anglais and now rebranded as Wrath of Man (appropriate, as there’s nary a woman in sight), it’s a tale most definitely rife with all the things Americans love about movie-going: carnage, theft, gunfire, revenge… disenfranchised army veterans. One just didn’t imagine it being quite so…well, British-ified. Not only by Guy Ritchie at the helm, but by Jason Statham in the lead role. This is a French story, after all, filled with a certain level of passion that Brits can’t always muster. Then again, with Shakespeare as every English person’s storytelling forebear, one would think that a tale about cold, calculated revenge should be easy enough to execute for those with Hamlet in their blood. And for Ritchie, technically it is. Especially since he’s seemed to discount entirely the era we’re living in.
And yes, this is something he’s frequently done, it’s just that it’s never been so glaringly obvious as we’re hurtled more and more into the future. Or what the future is supposed to be. Don’t get one wrong, it has to be acknowledged that it’s extremely difficult to make a movie in this epoch, particularly as a man when you actually have to at least pretend to attempt some modicum of sensitivity (unless, of course, you’re Ritchie). Some acknowledgement that women exist beyond just being fuck toys and speaking occasional lines when they’re being threatened by a gun. Even Ritchie’s frequently mentioned American parallel, Quentin Tarantino, finally got called out for his limited portrayal of women with Once Upon A Time in Hollywood after giving Margot Robbie scarcely any dialogue. Some might try to defend this “style” as a director’s “artistic” prerogative. But it isn’t so much artistic as a longstanding form of white male privilege to utterly discount a feminine perspective. Or any perspective, really, that doesn’t play into the two-dimensional machismo trope. While this may have worked in the past, it presently comes across as evermore cartoonish. Like a parody of how men once genuinely believed they had to act in order to be “men.”
Admittedly, however, there are still far too many among the male species who do feel and act this way, so one can’t truly say Ritchie’s portrayals are unrealistic. Yet one would think the director might feel a certain responsibility to amend his steadily more antiquated depictions. This includes packing the script with the kind of homophobic dialogue Ritchie was able to get away with more effortlessly at the outset of his career. And, indeed, one can’t help but wonder how Madonna was ever married to this person, so fearful of his straight world being infiltrated by “poofs” (maybe that’s why no one ever appears shirtless in this movie—it would be too “suggestive”—or maybe too tempting [for a certain party who doesn’t want to be tempted] is the better word choice). To that end, her brother, Christopher Ciccone, writing rather extensively about Ritchie’s homophobic nature, offers an assessment that appears to hold ever truer—even if some of the other things in his memoir, Life With My Sister Madonna, might be patent hyperbole. When commenting on the book, Ritchie used his marriage to the pop star as armor against the accusation, commenting, “…you’d be hard pushed to be a homophobe and marry Madonna.” Or was it, in fact, his best cover? One that he ought to have stuck with—for you know what they say about homophobes: they tend to be gay themselves.
Patrick Hill (Statham), like Ritchie, is out of a wrinkle in time when “men were men” and women were rarely seen (unless to be briefly ogled and potentially quickly fucked)—and certainly not heard. But we are meant to find him sympathetic because he has been wronged. A victim of terrible circumstance after his son is brutally murdered before his own eyes. Hill, too, is shot soon after, but—naturally—survives the assault because of his “warrior” spirit. His intense need to avenge the death of his boy. In this moment, one has to wonder if Ritchie would be able to do the same for his own golden son, Rocco. Maybe, in some subconscious way, this is his “love letter” to that relationship—the son that launched a new generation for the Ritchie dynasty.
Maybe it was even Ritchie’s way of bringing his old family closer together by filming in L.A., where Madonna and her brood currently reside. And, since any heist film set in Los Angeles is bound to be measured against Heat, Ritchie goes for broke in trying to impress his audience with as many plot twists, torture scenes and shootouts as he can, all, for once, setting his script outside of Britain and/or Europe. Going hyper-niche on his California crusade, Ritchie includes a restyled version of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” during one of the most memorable scenes of Wrath of Man. Use of this track is itself a roundabout homage to Heat—the mack daddy of Los Angeles-based heist movies. For not only did the cast of the movie visit Folsom Prison for research, but screenwriter Michael Mann also provides the casual bandying of the prison’s name in the dialogue, used in such instances as, “Remember what Jimmy McElwain used to say in the yard at Folsom?” and “Seven years in Folsom. In the hole for three.”
Despite Hill’s criminal past, he himself seems to have evaded any hard time, carving out a living with robberies in conjunction with his own crew. The crew he’s now using to shake down any information he can get about who could have been responsible for his son’s death. In his quest for avengement, nothing will stop Hill from extracting what he needs—whether that means metaphorically or literally.
While Statham’s great “skill” as an actor is to remain completely unflinching in the face of anything, not every leading man could carry off the burdens of this kind of typecasting. But Ritchie’s main characters, equally as prone to gay panic as the director himself, are required to make up for any perceived “weakness” by being over the top in their projections of “maleness.” Maybe this, too, is why one major character attribute missing in the translation of Alexandre Demarre (Albert Dupontel) from Le Convoyeur is the fact that he had epilepsy. To imbue Hill with that trait would, ostensibly, be too emasculating for his steely, tough-as-nails demeanor. In short, that’s not a “Ritchie man.”
Divided into four chapters (Ritchie is fond of the “chapter” device in plot apportioning), “A Dark Spirit,” “Scorched Earth,” “Bad Animals, Bad” and “Liver, Lungs, Spleen, Heart,” we never quite achieve the sense of satisfaction and redemption that we’re meant to—after all this buildup. It even seems like Hill isn’t as “at peace” as he should be upon vanquishing his most challenging enemy. Perhaps that’s why the better, more poetic ending rests with Le Convoyeur, during which the patriarch of the story drives to the spot where his son was murdered to lie down and die (his post-shootout injuries being too traumatic to overcome this time).
To make matters worse for the movie, Ritchie seems totally adrift when it comes to Los Angeles. Either not seeing it for the potential it has when rendered to screen, or simply mirroring his own feelings/lack of affinity for the city back to his audience. Case in point, a shady moment when he pans up to the skyline of Downtown Los Angeles to reveal it is drenched in smog. It feels like a pointed dig, and conveniently forgets that London ain’t exactly recovered from its Industrial Revolution air pollution. But fine, Ritchie clearly feels more at home in the land of Tories, where misogyny, racism and homophobia still aren’t half as checked as they are in California.
Some attempts at giving his interpretation of L.A. the “Heat treatment” fall short, even though there are plenty of overhead shots of streets and freeways. But, by and large, Ritchie doesn’t use the city to its utmost advantage as a supporting character, evidently not knowing it well enough to do so other than name-checking a couple of restaurants through the mouths of the characters (shoutout to Blossom on South Main Street).
But the problem of “place” (or rather, an affinity with that place) is the least of Ritchie’s worries in this movie. It’s more the fact that as his twelfth—yes, twelfth—film, we have yet to see anything (barring his “payday movies,” including Aladdin) that indicates he’s willing to break the now formulaic mold that established him back in 1998 with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Except even the mute woman in that movie was more interesting (if you’ll remember her sudden dramatic jolt to life to point a gun) than the one in Wrath of Man. Instead, Ritchie wants only to lean further into it… lest he be accused of being a poof or something.
