Wrath of Man

Guy Ritchie’s 2021 film runs in four titled chapters: A Dark Spirit, Scorched Earth, Bad Animals Bad, and Liver, Lungs, Spleen and Heart. The second winds the clock back to explain who H, played by Jason Statham, really is; the next rebuilds the same event from the robbers’ side. Expect a straight revenge line and you get a structure that keeps going back to add information. The source is Le Convoyeur, Nicolas Boukhrief’s 2004 French film, where the hero also joins a cash transport firm to find the man who shot his son in front of him. Ritchie says the idea came to him more than ten years earlier while watching it, and that the French picture is about a quarter of his own. On tone he is blunt: he was trying his hardest not to laugh or make it funny. Anyone who wants the verbal sparring of Snatch comes away empty. Shooting began in November 2019 in Los Angeles and London; release slipped from January to May 2021 because of the pandemic. It took roughly three times as much abroad as at home. A good fit if you treat the replaying of one robbery day with fresh information as the game itself. Not for viewers who read the chapter headings as stalling and want events in order.