The lack of capable drama becomes more of an issue in the many scenes about bigotry. The film describes the people who died fighting Nazism as Nazis themselves. And, the movie does this from a fake wartime London which resembles Bridgerton. It invents it’s setting and then complains about it. It seems a fundamentally senseless approach to the material at hand. And it is a disaster for the otherwise fine performances we happen upon within it, such as Benjamin Clementine’s Nigerian air warden, Ife.
But there is a little poetry. Jumpy black-and-white footage of daisies amusingly resembles nothing less than a pastiche of the macro zoom atoms Nolan lensed in last year’s Oppenheimer. And the film does a great job of fetishizing the bombs. They constantly gyre and spin, whether within the lathes at Rita’s munitions factory or when they plummet to earth. They represent well the foul energy from the wrong end of the Industrial Revolution, and McQueen’s fascination with them is rewarding.
“…there is no apparent appetite for manifesting the apocalypse above London.”
This film feels like it doesn’t have a script, even though it has the wit and posturing to pretend otherwise. What it has is two stories that don’t work. Ronan and Heffernan have some nice moments together, but I didn’t get much from either performance, and most of their adventures just felt like ‘busy work.’ Paul Weller is really terrific. But the rest of the film is so grudgeful with real character that I began to suspect he was put there to trick me into liking something as reactionary as a well scrubbed cockney at a piano?
Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke are startling as a couple of Fagin-like grotesques, but they are too little, too late. Also, it was frustrating to see them in the same scene. I’d hoped each actor would play their own episode. Instead, they come across as two parts of the same role, a kind of evil, East End Master-Blaster. Fun but limited. And their scenes, as written, weigh nothing at all within the story.
So, sadly, Blitz disappoints on nearly every level. What should be there isn’t, and what shouldn’t be is.
Blitz screened at the 2024 London Film Festival.
"…magically turns every German bomb into a lecture on the racial intolerance of white Britons."
