The obvious comparison is Michael Mann’s Heat - the less obvious one is Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, which is also about an Englishman in L.A. The movie could have done without this, just as it could have done without Christopher Benstead’s bombastic score and Ritchie’s Biblical symbolism. I’m troubled and confused by the hero being aided by a ring of FBI agents whose tactics are even more brutal than the criminals’. Furthermore, the flashbacks are told from the different perspectives of a group of mobsters and the perpetrators of that robbery. I’m guessing the original is responsible for the script’s ingenious flashback structure, which fills in missing information such as that H was not precisely an innocent bystander in the job that resulted in his son’s death. This is a remake of Nicolas Boukhrief’s 2004 French thriller Cash Truck, which I haven’t seen.

Now H is looking for that same crew to hit his truck so he can take revenge on his son’s murderer.

A flashback reveals that months earlier, he drove into a cash truck robbery and saw the thieves shoot his teenage son (Eli Brown), who was visiting him from the U.K. The first clue that he’s not just another working stiff comes the first time that armed robbers hold up his truck: H breaks protocol and follows the thieves’ instructions until he leaps out of the truck and dispatches six of them with seven bullets. Statham plays Patrick Hill, who quickly acquires the nickname “H” when he takes a new job as a security guard for an armored truck company that ferries cash around L.A. How I wish I could report that this film had the same sense of fun as those. He’s also reunited with Guy Ritchie, the director whose star rose in tandem with his in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. My last few movie reviews have required me to be quite serious and conscientious indeed, but Statham’s new movie Wrath of Man promises the comforts of the time before this global plague, when you could watch his shoot-em-up action features in relative security. Sometimes in life, you just want to see Jason Statham shooting people.

Guy ritchie, jason statham movies