Jason Statham in ‘Wrath of Man’

These are strange times indeed, when I feel compelled to disclose that I saw Guy Ritchie’s new film Wrath of Man (in theaters May 7) on an actual big screen. That’s the only way anyone can see the movie for the foreseeable future. But for a year now, critics have had almost all viewing relegated to at-home viewing via fuzzy links—so Wrath of Man playing loud and looming at a Manhattan screening room perhaps made the film feel a bit more significant than it actually is.

When last we saw Mr. Ritchie’s work, he was revisiting his old Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels stylings with The Gentlemen, an agreeably complicated but needlessly crass comic crime saga that came out about six weeks before the end of the world. With Wrath of Man, Ritchie goes for something similarly sleek and nervy but much more serious. A remake of the 2004 French film Cash Truck, Wrath of Man is a hardboiled revenge movie, stern and bloody and hulking with tough-guy rage.

Which isn’t to say that Ritchie doesn’t try some of his lighter tricks. He often works in echo of Quentin Tarantino; here, he attempts the same vignette-y style of Tarantino’s most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The movie is divided into chapters, switching focus and time periods to build toward a guns-blazing climax. In that skipping around, Ritchie does manage some interesting effect, mostly through muscular stagings of horribly violent crimes. His dialogue—written with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies—is florid, characters speaking in a stilted pastiche of Tarantino’s many murderous philosophers. The language doesn’t always work, but the effort is appreciated; Ritchie is determined that this not be just another throwaway gangster movie.

Toward that end, Ritchie has also employed Christopher Benstead to score the film. Benstead won an Oscar for doing the sound mixing on Gravity, which helped make that film’s score (by Steven Price) such an integral part of the experience. Benstead’s compositions for Wrath of Man are featured just as prominently, a churn of deep strings and bellowing “braam”s that elevates the material. In a dark room with a good sound system blaring away, Wrath of Man is almost as towering and immersive as one of Christopher Nolan’s solemn popcorn wonderments. Without the music to mask its thinness, though, Wrath of Man certainly wouldn’t register as keenly.

Jason Statham plays a mysterious, laconic Brit living in Los Angeles who gets a job as an armored truck guard, traversing the city’s industrial wastelands rarely seen on film. His motivations are murky, but his lethal competency is unquestioned. This line of work is no doubt dangerous at times, but Ritchie puffs it up to something akin to doing supply runs behind enemy lines during wartime. To illustrate the peril of Statham’s position, Ritchie treats us to the same armored truck heist three times, viewed from three different perspectives, among other violent scenes. What happens during that disastrous robbery informs the movie’s revenge plot. Details are slowly parsed out, though the crux of the matter is immediately evident to an even half-savvy viewer.

Stripped of its intricate construction, Wrath of Man is really just about one bad man angry at some other bad men for a bad thing that happened during a job—and getting payback for it. Statham carries that narrative simplicity convincingly enough, but his stony affect begins to seem brittle amid all the high opera of the film’s aesthetic trappings. A more soulful actor might have actually tapped into the sadness at the heart of the film, which would have given all the brutally articulated reprisal that much more weight.

Again, though, Statham and Ritchie are at least trying. Wrath of Man’s pretensions have their charms, as does the coterie of British supporting actors mumbling their way through American accents. Perhaps I am just starved for scale, but I was taken by the film’s sprawl of characters, its gray-blue aerial shots of railroad-track scars and container crane colossi, its music rising up around the proceedings like a giant wave.

It’s all pleasingly robust and cinematic, if fleeting. The plot eventually stalls out and plummets into an anticlimax, and some of Ritchie’s manly patter is ugly enough to earn a wince. (Though I am sticking with my theory that his many films’ obsessive joking about gayness and gay sex may be trying to tell us something in aggregate.) Still, it’s an honest-to-goodness movie meant to be seen, and luckily available on, the great canvas of a multiplex screen. Aren’t so many of us so terribly bored after all these months? For Wrath of Man’s turgid two hours, I quite happily was anything but.