Mr. Movie: With ‘Wrath of Man,’ Ritchie is back in his element

Wrath of Man

“Wrath of Man” is a crime drama. It’s also a thriller. And it’s a good one.

Jason Statham stars as H. He’s hired as a security guard for a company whose trucks haul large sums of cash. The company keeps getting robbed. H. stops one. And then another. He’s frighteningly good at stopping bad guys and not — to his coworkers — what he seems.

Spot on. H. is not.

The man is on a mission. One of the gangs that robbed the company took something precious from him. He can’t get it back but he can get revenge.

Statham’s co-stars for “Wrath of Man” include former movie heartthrob, Josh Hartnett (“Pearl Harbor,” “Wicker Park”), Andy Garcia, Eddie Marsan and Scott Eastwood who handles the villain duties. Director Guy Ritchie also plops some very good no-name actors in key roles.

They’re perfectly cast.

You could argue that Ritchie is the inventor of this genre. And when Guy Ritchie directs this genre like Guy Ritchie, no one does it better. Ritchie’s “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” “Snatch,” “Revolver” and “RocknRolla,” are classic. They defined him as a director.

Then Ritchie took a left turn and left all of us scratching our heads.

He did the very lame Sherlock Holmes redos with Robert Downey Jr. To confuse us further, he directed the awful, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and went farther downhill with a needless Camelot update, “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” and — worst of all — Disney’s “Aladdin” in 2019.

I’m thinking aliens kidnapped Ritchie and replaced him with a lookalike.

Somewhere in 2017 or 2018 the aliens gave moviegoers and critics a break and returned the real Ritchie. In 2019, Ritchie released “The Gentlemen.” It took him back to his roots. Gratefully, Ritchie is still deep in his roots with “Wrath of Man.”

The always stone-faced Statham is at the center of “Wrath of Man’s” conflict. It is cleverly laid out in chapters and the story — based on a 2004 French film, “Cash Truck” — bounces several times from present to past and back. It is superbly done — and very complex — and packed with oddball characters, lots of gunplay and violence, and more than a few twists and turns.

Perfect.

▪ Rated R for violence, language and mature themes. It’s playing at the Fairchild Cinemas Queensgate 12, Southgate 10 and Pasco and at the AMC Classic Kennewick 12.

▪ Rating: 4 out of 5

The Virtuoso

Anson Mount is The Virtuoso. He’s a hitman who does odd jobs for Anthony Hopkins, The Mentor. Something goes wrong on one of his hits and an innocent woman is burned to death. Even more horrifying for Virtuoso is that she dies in front of her young son.

It sets him adrift and has him wondering why he does what he does.

To help get him set straight again, The Mentor sends him on a mission. He’s to find and kill someone and must arrive at a certain small town diner at 5 p.m. His only clue? White Rivers. He thinks it might be a person. But maybe not. When he arrives at the diner, other hitmen are there, too.

Odd.

Also at the diner is a waitress who definitely wants his body. She’s done by Abbie Cornish (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “RoboCop”). They play cat-and-mouse until he has to go to work.

Mount — who has the lead in the next Star Trek movie as Captain Christopher Pike — plays this one with zero emotion. All lines are delivered in a flat, matter-of-fact way. Writer/director Nick Stagliano and co-writer James Wolf have him narrate Virtuoso’s thoughts on his chosen profession, the task at hand and his relationship with The Mentor.

Costarring with Mount and Cornish are David Morse, Eddie Marsan and Richard Brake. They, too, have film noir-like names and very little dialogue. In fact, only Hopkins — in a brilliantly done cemetery scene — has lines that aren’t dashed off quickly and succinctly.

“The Virtuoso” isn’t for everyone.

For those of us wanting something a little more simple, Stagliano has produced a near perfect copy of the kind of film noir you’d have seen on movie screens in the 1940s. He’s going to get bashed by critics and a lot of movie fans.

Unless you get what Stagliano is trying to do, the movie fails on a lot of levels. For me, from the often stiff, awkward dialogue and odd-named, two-dimensional characters to the twist ending, this one is a simplistic blast.

▪ Rated R for mature themes, language, violence and nudity. You can stream this one.

▪ Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5

This story was originally published May 6, 2021 at 10:44 PM with the headline "Mr. Movie: With ‘Wrath of Man,’ Ritchie is back in his element."