If there’s one actor and director pairing that’s guaranteed to get dads into the multiplex, it’s Jason Statham and **Guy Ritchie. **Sure, they’ve not worked together for a little while, but their shared history is dynamite and you know you’re getting a good two hours of Cockney wit and bone crunching action. Statham broke out in Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, then followed it up with ***Snatch, ***and since then, both have build massive careers for themselves. But fans have been waiting a heck of a long time for them to properly reunite on something that feels like it lives up to their previous work. Thankfully, their next movie has taken a major leap forward.
Viva La Madness, the new action thriller from the duo, has officially wrapped production. The movie was first announced in October 2025, but things have clearly moved quickly behind the scenes. Ritchie opened up to Collider’s Steve Weintraub about the movie while promoting In the Grey, confirming that production had already finished:
“I think we finished that about a month ago.”
He also made it clear that the project has been a long time coming for both him and Statham. Ritchie added, “It was a great pleasure working with Jason. It’s true to its title. By the way, Jason and I have been trying to make that for about 10 years or more, so it was a catharsis making it. It should be great. We’re only a month or so into the editing, but it’s pretty great fun. I’m not sure when we wrap that up, when that comes out, but great fun, and I had a wonderful time making it.”
Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.
You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things.
The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you.
You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.
Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.
The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way.
Ritchie and Statham have worked together several times over the years, including Revolver, Wrath of Man, and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre but this feels like a proper reunion between the duo because it’s not just another Statham action movie, it feels like a proper Ritchie gangster movie again.
Viva La Madness is based on the book by J.J. Connolly, which serves as the literary sequel to *Layer Cake, *but this film is very much not a sequel, so it’s a bit confusing. Layer Cake, directed by **Matthew Vaughn **and starring Daniel Craig, was based on Connolly’s 2000 novel. Connolly later wrote Viva La Madness as a follow-up novel in 2011, and now Ritchie and Statham are bringing that book to the screen. But again, not as a sequel to that movie. Keeping up? Good stuff. It won’t matter when we see it. Ritchie teased that the film will lean into the madness promised by the title:
“It’s based on the book, and so for anyone familiar with the book, it’s a great, fun book. So, that’s the world, and it is mad. So, as I said, the clue’s in the title, in Viva la Madness. So, it should be great fun. I think it is.”
There’s no confirmed release date yet for Viva La Madness.
](/tag/thriller/)
Adam Bohling, David Reid, Matthew Vaughn