Review of Wild Card (2015) by Harry W — 15 May 2015

Re-teaming Jason Statham with director Simon West after creating the action masterpiece The Expendables 2, Wild Card sounded like a promising.

Against expectations, Wild Card is hardly a film you could consider an action film. In actual fact, it goes for the angle of being a legitimate crime thriller which really subverted my expectations. But based on his past, I know that Jason Statham has a knack for a good crime thriller once in a while. But Wild Card left me questioning the capabilities of Simon West in this area. Wild Card is clearly a film which has a lot of potential to be a strong character study or a stylishly intense crime thriller, but Simon West decides to loosely walk the line between the two of these while relying on Jason Statham's charisma without giving him weapons, fight scenes or jokes. What this really confronts is the fact that there is just not much of a story in Wild Card which can separate itself from the typical conventions of countless other revenge thrillers. It becomes clearer when the story fails to really go anywhere and takes so long not to get there that the viewer has just been numbed by the experience. There are good intentions behind Wild Card and the film does make an effort to be more than a generic action film, but this really misleads viewers based on the generic contract promised by the pairing of Jason Statham with Simon West and the trailers which suggested the feature would be action fuelled. The factor that nobody is told about Wild Card is simply this: the film is a drama about a man with a gambling addiction which falsely advertised itself as an action film, and Jason Statham is simply not up to the challenge of carrying the entire film on his shoulders. Jason Statham is a decent actor as his performances vary from film to film, and his best talents come from either action films or collaborating with Guy Ritchie. Wild Card instead leaves him stranded in the one dimensional where he has to carry everything and can only take it so far. The highlight of his performance predictably comes from the action scenes as he remains as vigilante as ever, but his monotonous tough guy attitude does not add depth to the character Nick Wild. Nick Wild is clearly not an action hero but rather a seriously conflicted human being, and casting Jason Statham in the role while titillating audiences to the idea that he is gonna spend the time kicking ass and taking names is an unfair play on audiences. Jason Statham has his moments in the film and he does maintain an effective gritty edge the entire time, but the material itself is not sufficient enough to support his ambitious efforts. This is just not the film for him, although the fact that he attempts to go for more dramatic work is certainly admirable. It's just not the right place for him because the feature is so image driven and bereft of characters that it doesn't know what to do with the talented array of cast members that it has on board.

The trailer of the film even took note of the fact that hilarious sitcom stars Jason Alexander and Sofia Vergara are in the film which leaves hope that there will be some kind of comedic value that comes with having them on board, but in actual fact the only humour in Wild Card seems to be the minor elements of deadpan humour that stem from the contrasting action scenes and music used in them. Wild Card is so bent on taking itself seriously as a drama that it forgets that Simon West is just not up to the challenge just yet, so he is really miscast as the director and his attempts to push Jason Statham through the material are just not effective enough. Frnakly, Wild Card is a film which really takes itself seriously and somehow stretches its budget to a full $30 million while failing to justify why or take advantage of the talented array of cast members. Frankly, Wild Card is a film which would have been better left in the hands of a low budget independent filmmaker who was more concerned about taking advantage of a strong script and getting the best out of their cast members than simply making a stylish film disguised as a Jason Statham action vehicle. Above all, Wild Card is just a misleading film which is its ultimate fault because it might have been a decent drama if it were advertised properly and didn't have so much promotion behind the specifics of a film which put them to such minimal use. Wild Card is one of those films where there is more action, humour and better performances in the trailer than the actual film, so if you've watched that thenyou need not go any further.

That being said, the action scenes in Wild Card are stylish. As the film aims to be a crime thriller rather than an over the top action thriller, the quantity of action scenes within it are limited. Because of that, Simon West works to ensure that the quality of them are effective. As well as making use of effective chorography, Wild Card integrates in a clever use of visual effects which gives a fine stylish edge to the feature. They aren't over the top and they come off as feeling genuine enough, and the visual style of Wild Card enhances it further even if the quantity of them is not on part with their overall quality. The soundtrack of the film is also decent, and the cinematography itself plays with focus very effectively in a lot of the dramatic scenes.

So Wild Card as decent dramatic ambitions from Jason Statham, but it relies on his limited charisma too much which causes it to easily decline into an excessively slow and uninvolving drama film clearly advertised as an action film which is most certainly is not.