An Angry Man: Explosive, Brutal and Uncompromising (review)
The remake of Nicolas Boukhrief’s Conveyor by Guy Ritchie, where Jason Statham once again shines, is coming to television
Updated November 12, 2023: After Scams, Crimes and Botany (1998), Snatch (2000) and Revolver
(2005), Guy Ritchie found his favorite actor, Jason Statham In An angry man (Wrath of Man in VO), an adaptation of Conveyor by Nicolas Boukhrief where Statham took over the role of Albert Dupontel. This muscular thriller is broadcast for the first time unencrypted on French television, this Sunday evening on TF1. It performed quite well in theaters when it was released in summer 2021, despite the pandemic, and received good reviews. At Première, we were totally won over by this revenge story severely burned.
Article from May 15, 2021: “Who is a man who is not angry?” » asks Alcibiades to the Senators. It’s in Shakespeare’s play, Timon of Athens : Who is the man who does not get angry? Certainly not Statham, whose business has been for twenty years: desire for mass destruction, a ball of rage which arrives in films with the intention of multiplying the loaves, and ravaging everything. Statham basically embodies a certain idea of film noir that we really like here: pulp phlegm, kaboom score-settling, life to death and shattering brutality. It’s an aesthetic. That’s good, it’s working at full capacity in the new Guy Ritchie.
More than an actor, he is here a concept. Strapped into his English suit, with his implacable build, Statham is fabulous in this revenge story tailor-made. An angry man is the remake of Conveyor but ultimately looks more like a tomb for the Stath’. By deconstructing the story, by multiplying the ellipses and narrative syncopations, Ritchie underlines the savagery of the hero whose motivations we only understand very late. Stress, fights, chases and vandalism have no meaning until we understand why this man is as crazy as he is mysterious.
Very British, very burnt, with that show-off side that we sometimes like (the “chapter heads” of the different sections of the film), Ritchie’s direction transforms Boukhrief’s social thriller into a pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy (we’ll come back to that ) entirely devoted to his granite hero.
An angry man. By Guy Ritchie. With Jason Statham, Jeffrey Donovan, Josh Hartnett… Duration 1h58. Sunday November 12, 2023 on TF1, at 9:10 p.m.
