Guy Ritchie movies, especially those of the gangster variety with which he started out 23 years ago, make life simple. You know what you're going to get walking in: a lot of shouting, a lot of skull-crushing music, a lot more shouting, and a boatload of blunt, brutal action. Not to say there's anything wrong with wall-to-wall uproar — who doesn't love the John Wick movies? But the Wick pictures have a sense of humor, and their action is, for the most part, brilliantly choreographed — they have personality . Guy Ritchie doesn't make those movies.
Ritchie's latest is a heist picture called "Wrath of Man," and the best that can be said of it is that it stars Jason Statham. Ritchie and Statham both began their feature-film careers with Ritchie's "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels." Since then, Statham has gone on to become a stubbly, shiny-headed icon of action cinema, while Ritchie has gone on to continue being Guy Ritchie. (Although, it must also be said, in his favor, that Ritchie almost always delivers for his audience, which is large, and often scores at the box office.)
In his fourth Ritchie collaboration, Statham plays "H," a mysterious man of very few words (maybe five or six in some scenes, if you count the grunts and the snarls). This character's real name is Hill, so let's call him that. One day he walks into the office of an armored-truck company called Fortico, which picks up multi-millions of dollars in cash from banks and high-volume retailers and hauls it around Los Angeles every day. You can see where this is going.
Hill feigns meager skills in shooting and driving and running around at first, so you immediately know something is up, because ... well, because Statham. Hill's fellow Fortico employees are initially surly, but after he single-handedly foils an attempted vehicular rip-off, they're breaking into applause whenever he enters a room. This happens pretty early on in the picture, because Ritchie likes to move things along even if viewers haven't quite grasped what he's trying to communicate to them (a problem compounded here by the muffled dialogue in scenes in which the characters are wearing masks or speaking Australian).
The plot, which is lifted from a 2004 French film by Nicolas Boukhrief, has Fortico in the crosshairs of two violent criminal outfits. One is composed of highly trained veterans of the never-ending U.S. war in Afghanistan; the other is just a bunch of really, really bad guys. Statham blows away many of these deserving characters, but not in any especially memorable ways. (In his devotion to undifferentiated blam-blam-blam, Ritchie is a master of monotony.)
We eventually learn why Statham's character is such an angry guy, and we sympathize. Then we move on with our lives and hope it won't be too long before we can get another dose of Statham, with his squinty glare and tight-lipped charisma — preferably in a movie by some other director.
'The Columnist'
Femke Boot (Katja Herbers of "Westworld") is a columnist at an Amsterdam newspaper. Like many people, she spends way too much time online, usually reading over her latest columns — earnest political observations or wryly sketched personal anecdotes — on the paper's website. Femke may tell herself she's just checking for typos or other technical flaws, but in reality she's breaking the first rule of online life: Never Read the Comments.
She can't avert her eyes:
"filthy whore"
"sexless bitch"
"leftie witch"
Who are these people, and why are they consumed with such frothing hatred? Is it really because she's "gotten fat"? Really?
"What an ugly mug."
"I hope they rough up your daughter."
"I know where you live."
Femke tells a friend about this ongoing assault but gets no sympathy. Since she never went to the police about it, the friend says, "It's obviously not that bad."
So she does go to the police, and they can't figure out what sort of complaint she could file. "It's just the internet," says one cop. "It's not real."
So she decides to take the situation into her own hands. Discovering the identity of one of her tormenters, she pays him a visit — and, on a whim, pushes him off a roof to his death. A quiet smile of satisfaction brightens Femke's face, illuminating a way forward.
"The Columnist" takes aim at an important subject: the vicious online harassment of women, and what should be done about it. But despite a sharply satirical performance by Herbers, it never quite comes together; there's too much unnecessary other stuff going on. A subplot about a free-speech campaign being waged by Femke's teenage daughter Anna (Claire Porro) never lines up with the main story. Neither do some of the too-obvious symbols — a spider in a web, an old-time newsroom copy spike — that director Ivo van Aart has tucked in around the edges of the plot. And the picture's bloody ending hasn't been shaped for maximum impact — it's a little limp.
But one of the characters, a horror author who calls himself "Steven Death" (Bram van der Kelen), scores a solid hit on the fame biz. For public appearances, Death turns out in sinister eyeliner, with exotic rings on every finger and an unnecessarily complex ascot. After they appear together on a TV talk show, the veteran fright master tells Femke that lightening up a little could boost her brand. "You were there because you want to change the world," he says. "I was there to sell my new book."
As the movie zips along (it's only 86 minutes long), Herbers deftly makes us see that Femke is falling apart, that she may in fact have lost her mind. After all, killing people — even vicious online troglodytes — would be wrong, right?
Right?
Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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