I Am Wrath (2016)

I Am Wrath is a 2016 vigilante action picture from director Chuck Russell, starring John Travolta as Stanley Hill, a man whose wife is murdered after her pipeline safety study threatens corrupt officials. He becomes Wrath, tattoo included, and works his way up a chain of hired killers, dirty cops, and a governor with something to hide. The film is a standard revenge procedural with a Bible verse as branding. It has no interest in progressive social instruction. The title comes from Jeremiah, which is about divine anger, not HR compliance.

The cast includes Asante Jones as Dennis, a black-ops friend operating beneath a barbershop. His presence is welcome and entirely incidental. The film does not pause to examine race, nor does it ask us to. Women exist as wife, daughter, and hostage, with Rebecca De Mornay and Amanda Schull given little to do beyond being endangered. There is no LGBTQ thread, no body positivity, no neurodivergent character, no historical revision. The pipeline subplot might sound environmental, but it functions as a corruption device: water contamination as motive for murder, not a climate sermon. The villains are politicians and police, which gives the film a faint populist sneer. It is not an attack on capital as a system. It is an attack on the specific men who got caught.

The movie never lectures. It kills people, blows up cars, and moves on. A FISA court appears in the final act, which is a strange touch for a revenge film, but it is used for paranoia, not civics. The result is a grimy, forgettable thriller with an 11 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating and a title that sounds like a metal band. It offers representation only as background texture and critique only as local grievance. For those keeping score at home, that leaves most of the modern cultural checklist untouched. The film is not offensive. It is simply uninterested. There is something almost restful about that.