Chaos (2005)

Chaos arrives from 2005 bearing the weary gait of a thriller that knows exactly what it is and has made peace with the arrangement. Tony Giglio directs Jason Statham, Ryan Phillippe, and Wesley Snipes through a Seattle bank heist that yields no money and a great deal of mathematics. The cast is a monument to a vanished era of action cinema: white, male, and untroubled. Wesley Snipes appears as the antagonist, a supporting turn the film greets with no curiosity about what his presence might signify. He is the heavy. The two women in the ensemble, Justine Waddell and Jessica Steen, are assigned the traditional duties of the genre, which is to say they appear, they assist, and they recede.

Politically, the film is inert. Its villains are ex-convicts and disgraced officers nursing a grievance about a system that used them up and cast them aside, a sentiment that gestures toward class resentment without ever finishing the thought. The bank is a target, not a symbol. Nobody lectures. The chaos theory material, lifted from James Gleick's popular science volume, functions as a puzzle mechanic and a twist delivery device, not a thesis. The film name-drops a book and trusts the audience to infer intellectual ambition. There is no racial consciousness here, no environmental concern, no inquiry into identity, no interest in bodies or minds or the historical record. What remains is a heist picture that respects the conventions of the heist picture.

The result is competent, muddled entertainment, and there is something almost restful about its incuriosity. It premiered abroad in 2005 and reached North American shelves in 2008, a delay suggesting its own distributors struggled to locate a cultural argument for its existence. They were right not to look. Chaos concerns patterns, coincidence, and the impossibility of predicting human behavior, and it applies those ideas chiefly to a final reveal. The measure of social consciousness is correspondingly modest, which is not an insult. Some vintages are simply table wine.

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