Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		1.5

I Am Wrath Blu-ray Movie Review

He sure as heck ain't legend.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 25, 2016

John Kasich may have gotten trumped (sorry, couldn’t resist) in his quest to garner the Republican nomination for the presidency in this year’s election cycle, but there’s at least one thing for which he can be grateful: he’s not the Ohio governor at the center of the formulaic if sporadically exciting I Am Wrath. The film opens with one of those “ripped from the headlines” montages of supposed news reports which document an alarming uptick in violence through several Ohio neighborhoods. A number of patently disturbing videos flits by showing various people being shot to death, and the sad fact is that these dramatized segments have the awful ring of truth, one that resonates through our daily lives, at least for those who (perhaps against their will or at least their better judgment) pay attention to what’s on the news. The montage ends in a news conference being held by Ohio governor John Meserve (Patrick St. Esprit), who in typical politician fashion is spinning the out of control events as best he can, insisting that crime is actually down across Ohio. There’s also a brief sideline about a water project that is obviously meant to tease an upcoming plot point, but what’s most evident in this early scene is that Meserve is a slimeball and that there’s absolutely no doubt that he is going to end up being at least one of the central villains of the piece. With that element so clearly telegraphed so early, I Am Wrath tips its hand in a way that it’s really not out to surprise or doing anything even remotely innovative, but what’s so sad about this enterprise is that how despite an almost plodding predictability the film doesn’t even manage to entertain very well. Within a few more scenes, an Environmental Protection Agency worker named Vivian (Rebecca De Mornay, more or less wasted) doing background analysis on the water project is murdered in an airport parking garage after picking up her husband Stanley (John Travolta), dying in her aggrieved husband’s arms. If you think the cops are going to be any help tracking down the killer, or that Stanley won’t turn out to have (forgive me again) a “special set of skills” that makes him uniquely qualified to undertake the task himself, then you may have been avoiding popular film and television entertainment of the past several decades, perhaps in your attempts to also avoid the daily news barrage of horrifying murders.

It’s kind of interesting if obviously unintentional how I Am Wrath glances up against several issues currently confronting the United States, including rampant urban violence and a distrust of police. That shouldn’t lead anyone to believe that Yvan Gauthier and Paul Sloan’s screenplay does anything other than pay passing lip service to these concepts in order to set up the very basic Death Wish-esque plot mechanics. There is at least one notable difference in I Am Wrath’s premise that differentiates it from the long ago Charles Bronson film, and that’s that Stanley ends up not being a total lone wolf in his quest to bring his wife’s killers to justice. In just one of this film’s actually annoying machinations, Stanley reteams with Dennis (Christopher Meloni), his erstwhile partner in a “former life” as a CIA operative. It’s actually kind of funny to see Travolta and Meloni portraying two “company” men who have fallen on hard times and who for all intents and purposes seem to be blue collar stiffs who’d be just as likely to be found downing some Pabst Blue Ribbon as plotting to maim various bad guys, not to mention uncovering rampant police corruption and, ultimately, the collusion of that aforementioned slimeball governor.

One of the kind of sad things about I Am Wrath is how obvious it is about various plot points, clearly indicating the reasons for Vivian’s supposedly “random” killing, at least for those who are prone to wonder, “Why is that being mentioned in the film’s opening spiel?” Travolta, looking kind of haggard and pretty puffy, tries to go full Bronson here, but never seems to really believe what he’s saying and/or doing. The film has the requisite number of showdowns (including a repeated and ultimately kind of funny tendency for Stanley to stick guns in people’s faces while screaming threats at them), but the energy here is intermittent at best. Meloni is probably a bit more effective, essaying a decent guy who has a certain scuzzy quality that may inadvertently remind some fans of a kind of combo platter of the actor’s fantastic work on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Oz. The supporting cast is kind of by the numbers and includes Stanley’s family, notably daughter Abbie (Amanda Schull). In the “count your (cinematic) blessings” department, at least Abbie only comes close to actually being Taken.

My colleague Brian Orndorf had about the same lackluster response to I Am Wrath that I did. You can read Brian's assessment of the film here.

I Am Wrath Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I Am Wrath is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. The IMDb once again kind of curiously omits any technical data on the camera, but this looks like it was digitally captured, both due to the general sharpness, clarity and levels of fine detail (see screenshot 1), but also the pretty ungainly noise that creeps into some darker material (see screenshot 9). This is a perfectly competent and overall satisfying presentation, even if it's rarely spectacular looking. A lot of the film plays out in dark, murky environments, and while not all of them display the problems seen in the ninth screenshot, there's still an understandable deficit in detail levels at times, simply because things are so dark. In decent lighting, detail levels pop appreciably. The film has not been color graded to within an inch of its life, at least not most of the time, and the palette looks natural and actually surprisingly warm a lot of the time.

I Am Wrath Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

I Am Wrath features an occasionally bombastic sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, one that springs to life in several action sequences, though kind of amusingly despite the number of times guns get pointed in various people's faces, there's at least relatively little shooting going on, within the overall confines of the film's sound design. Instead immersion and impact are achieved through smart placement of ambient environmental sounds as well as some good, lifelike rendering of more "mundane" sounds like clothing being manhandled when various people are engaged in "up close and personal" contact. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly with good prioritization and excellent fidelity.

I Am Wrath Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Filmmaker Commentary features Chuck Russell and Paul Sloan, who both co-wrote the film and appears in it as one of the slimier villains.

I Am Wrath Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I Am Wrath is simply too derivative and too formulaic to ever muster up much energy. The film's occasional stumbling attempts to inject "meaning" into what is in essence nothing more than a revenge fantasy film similarly fall flat. Travolta or Meloni completists may want to check this out, and for those folks technical merits are generally very good to excellent.