Film Reviews

Blitz

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Aidan Gillen
• Details: UK / 97mins (18).

Guilty pleasure Jason Statham is back playing another tough cookie in this adaptation of Ken Bruen's novel, his third in eighteen months after Jack Taylor and London Boulevard. Moon's Nathan Parker is on writing duties and gives every tasty line to the lead man, who is in scene-munching form.
When we first meet Statham's tough-talking, no-nonsense Detective Sergeant Tom Brandt he accosts three car thieves with a hurley. Hurling, Brandt says, is "a cross between hockey and murder". That's the tone set from the off and Elliot Lester's thriller continues in this vein. Brandt's London is a lawless one, full of sexual deviants, paedophiles, hoodies, scum and psychos - one of which being Aidan Gillen's Barry Weiss, AKA The Blitz, a serial cop killer. Blitz torments the police force while seeking fame through sleazy tabloid journalists like David Morrissey.
Paddy Considine can slip into the skin of any role and the chameleon-like actor almost disappears into his fey Inspector but he takes a backseat to the J-Man and Aidan Gillen. Gillen reprises his unhinged psycho hell-bent on revenge role he turned in for 12 Rounds but he isn't as calm and calculated here. It's refreshing to see in a thriller such as this, when the bad guy isn't the perfect killer: Blitz ("as in Blitzkrieg") is, like his nickname, clumsy - when murdering one particular victim, Blitz is almost overpowered at one point during the lengthy, messy struggle. Strutting about the city with his shirt open, killing police in broad daylight, Gillen brings an edginess to the role.
If Considine and Gillen can transform on screen, Statham isn't changing for anyone: he has one mood here and that's pissed off, but there's no action hero around right now that does pissed off better than Statham. In Dirty Harry mode, Statham's action talents are put on hold as he's reduced to hanging around crime scenes, spitting Bruen's hardboiled dialogue with more than a hint of irony is his eyes. He's in a different movie to the rest of the cast and director Elliot Lester (Love Is The Drug) lets him away with it. It's a good call.
It's when Lester starts to take things seriously that Blitz comes undone. One subplot involving a WPC (Zawe Ashton), a recovering drug addict who is steering a local boy away from the life of crime, is shoehorned into the mix without rhyme or reason. The movie could have done without this time-stealing tangent.
Go see Blitz and have a giggle at the silliness of it all.

Review by Gavin Burke