REVIEW: Blitz

Why isn't Paddy Considine in better movies? Anyone?

Well its nice to see Jason Statham is still prepared to make English movies? That makes me happy. Not just that, but the people behind Blitz also managed to convince Paddy Considine to play his partner and The Wire/Game Of Thrones alum Aiden Gillen to play the bad guy. So while this was never going to be Chaucer, there was a chance it could have been dumb, excess-ridden guilty pleasure. But as it stands, Blitz could have been much, much worse. Sure Statham is ever the all-consuming charisma black hole at the centre of movies. Yes some of the dialogue can be pretty shocking and it is deathly stupid, but there are moments to enjoy.

Blitz does sort of feel like an episode of a TV police procedural, maybe with a few more fucks and brains blown out, but the gist is the same. Renegade cop Statham and offbeat partner Paddy Considine are on the case of a cop-killing psycho whose current modus operandi is to basically walk up to police officers and shoot them in the face. It's not a film for artistry after all. What follows is a lazy cat and mouse of sorts, occasionally lightened by some fun performances. Particularly Gillen, whose idiotic, borderline hermit psycho makes a nice change from the masterminds we are used to for this kind of thing. He felt like someone who didn't really know what he was doing and I thought that was a nice touch. Considine classes things up a little bit with his gay detective, whose homosexuality is defined as acceptable because he's also a tough guy, capable of beating up criminals. It's all very meat-headed, as you'd expect it to be, but there is at least a sombre, ham-fisted effort to develop character, particularly that of Zawe Ashton's rookie cop, who gets an entire sub-plot for seemingly no reason, and then gets abandoned for even less reason.

Still fans of Statham will probably be satisfied. There's plenty of him acting the hard-man and beating the shit out of people for your pound, and in a way its exactly the kind of generic thriller that rarely gets a cinematic release these days, so if you've been screaming for that bandwagon to return then maybe you'll get a kick out of this. You're also probably quite a dull person, but to each to their own. Destined to be rented by mistake by some poor soul who thinks its a world war 2 movie, and then subsequently watched with passive engagement.

Rating: 4/10