Steve McQueen’s Blitz looks pretty but fails to ignite
There are no two ways about it, Steve McQueen’s Blitz, the Oscar-winning director’s return to feature filmmaking, is a disappointing dud.
It has been six years since McQueen’s Widows drew a largely muted reception (I liked it!) but time off working on the Small Axe anthology series and the epic documentary Occupied City has not seen the British director, 55, rediscover the early career panache that saw him become one of the most exciting filmmakers on either side of the Atlantic.
Blitz has the trappings of a passion project for McQueen; his first movie set in the city he grew up in and touching on themes familiar to him and his previous work (most notably societal racism).
But sadly none of that passion finds its way to the screen in this tale of a mother and son driven apart by war and desperate to reunite.
It’s London in September 1940 and Saoirse Ronan plays Rita, a munitions worker from Stepney Green. She lives with her dad Gerald (a charming turn by Paul Weller) and her son George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan is confident and assured). Every night they have to flee to a bomb shelter — or Tube station — to escape the murderous Nazi bombing campaign that is turning London to rubble.
She’s protective of her mixed-race son, with racist slurs all too common on the capital’s streets, but reluctantly agrees for George to be evacuated to the countryside. However pretty soon he has other ideas, jumping off the train and attempting to make it back to east London.
But, for a movie about an imperiled child and a heartbroken mother, who lost her partner after an attack by racists, there’s very little peril or heartbreak in Blitz.
A blistering opening of fire and fury gives way to what is, ultimately, a rather staid and ordinary tale, with a screenplay bogged down in episodic subplots and flashbacks. Forty minutes in and I was already checking my watch: an ominous sign.
Rather than focus on George’s perilous journey, McQueen is instead preoccupied with Blitz’s verisimilitude. There’s an impressive eye for detail and Apple’s deep pockets are put to good use but McQueen keeps losing focus from what should be the story at hand: George’s daring return to London.
Pretty soon he hitches a ride on a train returning to London and befriends other fellow runaways before tragedy hits. But the script is just too kind to George, he never feels in any true danger, even from the racist thugs. A guardian angel is never too far away. In one scene where he actually feels under threat and my blood was finally pumping, McQueen instead cuts away.
Maybe McQueen thinks the story is a bit too similar to his Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave — also a tale of a desperate journey to safety.
But whereas 12 Years was caustic and brutal, even masochistic, Blitz is too safe and sanitised. It’s got all the right trappings but it doesn’t know where to go or what to say (except the salient point that WW2-era London was more cosmopolitan than it has been portrayed).
We are regularly spirited away from George and back to Rita in London, who is plugging away at her factory job. But despite the healthy screentime, Ronan isn’t given too much to do beyond furrowing her brow and singing (not at the same time). Her colleagues are the rebellious types, interrupting a BBC broadcast to protest over bomb shelters, but Rita just misses her boy.
Once the movie got past the hour mark, I wondered when, if ever, it would ignite.
Stephen Graham’s Fagin-adjacent ruin-looting Albert provides some threat late on, but his outright villainy jars in a movie which strives for social realism. (Kathy Burke is good but wasted, a similar story with Harris Dickinson).
There’s one terrific bombing sequence on the banks of the Thames and some mass panic at a Tube station that begins to flood but it feels like too little too late to save Blitz from middle-of-the-road mediocrity that will wither away on Apple+ after a token cinematic release.
Period detail and fine performances can only take you so far (although Blitz is above Darkest Hour, which is also about London enduring the horrors of the Nazi war machine).
But from a filmmaker with McQueen’s reputation, I expected and wanted more than an episodic plod through bombed-out London.
Even at just shy of two hours it feels overlong, stuffed with unnecessary details or diversions. There’s some good work on screen, especially by Heffernan (what a find), but it’s all for naught without any emotion or terror pulling the heartstrings.
Some of the soft-hearted might shed a tear at the end but I was just left thinking: “Is that it?”
