H (Jason Statham) takes a job as a security guard for an armoured vehicle company who transport millions of dollars in cash. He is cold and mysterious and hides his natural talents for gunplay. As his story unfolds it is clear that his interest in the job lays solely with a previous robbery where an innocent civilian was killed. 

Wrath of Man’s lack of a UK release date baffled me. This is a Guy Ritchie film (Producer, Co-Writer and Director) starring Jason Statham for goodness sake. Ritchie’s last film The Gentlemen was a welcome return to form and Statham is a known quantity when it comes to action flicks. If you can not market that prospect over here then I am not sure what you can? So why is a film that was released in the US in May of this year only just coming out over here? Well, I do not have insider industry knowledge so I can not tell you, what I can say is that we were not missing much and it arriving with no ceremony on Amazon Prime Video is not a huge loss to anyone.

Of it’s many sins perhaps the biggest is that it does not feel like a Guy Ritchie film at all. There is virtually no sense of cool, no sequences with fun camera moves and virtually zero ‘hilarious’ banter from his characters. Instead we have an action film that relies on pedestrian gunplay, wastes a number of interesting casting decisions and has huge pacing problems. 

The pacing problems are rife. Every time the story starts to pick up momentum it will jump to a different time frame or a different set of characters and start again. The number of title cards stating 1 month later, 5 months later, 3 weeks ago and the like is frankly crazy. Whilst the need to try and tell the story from multiple perspectives is frustrating when the characters are all just stereotypes. We have the vengeful man, the inside man, the ex-soldiers turned to crime, hardcore criminal gangs, FBI agents who look the other way and the suits at the company who can not quite put their finger on the weird H. 

Whilst we have the absolutely criminal waste of casting that brings the likes of Josh Hartnett, Andy Garcia, Eddie Marsan and Niamh Algar into the film without giving them anything interesting to do. All whilst Scott Eastwood gets to play a key role! 

Ultimately this is low tier Guy Ritchie and I suggest watching with low expectations.