Widows is a heist movie, and so much more. In UK cinemas now and opening in the US next week, this tense new film from 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen comes with a slam-bang hook: when a bunch of armed robbers get dead, their widowed wives pull off the next job. But it’s also packed with powerhouse performances, twisting storylines and layers of thematic nuance, making it much more than your average heist thriller. Unfortunately, Widows doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts. The first thing to salivate over is the list of names involved. McQueen worked on the script with Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, based on a TV series and novel by British crime queen Lynda LaPlante. Then there’s the stellar cast list: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, Daniel Kaluuya, Elizabeth Debicki, Robert Duvall… It’s a mark of quality that even the minor characters are played by the well-regarded likes of Carrie Coon from Fargo and Jon Bernthal of The Walking Dead and The Punisher. Then there’s the grabby concept. But Ocean’s 8 this ain’t: the heist is just one strand of a multi-layered exploration of greed, injustice, race and power that snakes from the street up through the corridors of power. Heist movies have clearly-defined structures: recruiting the gang, planning the job, the job goes wrong — you know the drill. Widows flirts with that structure, but adds smart twists. For example, the characters are dispatched on intel-gathering sub-missions that in many crime movies… [Read full story]
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