Jason Statham has slotted himself into a lot of franchises, like the Fast and Furious movies and The Expendables, plus some that are totally his own, like The Meg and The Transporter back in the day. Even with so many standalone movies, like A Working Man and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, he’s clearly not too concerned about returning to a well that’s already been dug. So, if Statham doesn’t mind making sequels, he needs to jump back on one of his best movies in recent years: Wrath of Man.
Released to positive reviews in 2021 and directed by Guy Ritchie, Wrath of Man did okay at the box office but has become a genuine smash hit on streaming (it’s currently tearing it up on Prime Video). And there’s a good reason for that, too: The movie is a blast. It seems unsurprisingly inspired by Michael Mann’s brilliant masterpiece Heat, because it involves armored car heists in Los Angeles, but there’s a scrappiness to it that makes it feel trashier than Heat (in a positive way). There are also very few traditionally heroic good guys, because even the people who aren’t villains are pretty annoying, but that means Statham gets to play with some more interesting tools than his usual “man on a mission” repertoire.
Why Does Wrath of Man Deserve a Sequel?
It’s tough to talk about Wrath of Man without spoiling the premise, which Ritchie gradually unfolds over the course of four distinct acts (with their own title card and everything), but Statham plays a man who constructs a fake identity so he can get a job at a security company. A suspiciously professional crew of robbers has been hitting armored trucks in L.A., and Statham — who barely tries to act like a normal person at all — is trying to find out who’s planning the heists and who at the security company is involved… for some unknown reason that you don’t find out until later. By the end of the movie, essentially everyone is dead and no one has learned a lesson, except for the people who died, which is an appropriately bleak and cynical ending for a movie that centers around a man who freaks everybody out when they see him because he’s so ice-cold.
As definitive as that seems, the movie does leave some interesting threads that could be tugged on in a sequel. Statham is eventually revealed to be a criminal himself, and his single-minded dedication to his quest in Wrath of Man could easily alienate his own criminal allies or embolden his criminal competitors. Statham is very much the protagonist here, but there could be a Terminator 2-style sequel where he becomes a good guy to fight an even worse bad guy, or it could be like his arc in Fast and Furious, where it just turned out that he was always basically a good guy. With all these action movies about heroes fighting for their families, it might be nice to get a franchise about a real bastard who genuinely becomes a better person. Or maybe he just says a bastard. That would also be fun.
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