Jason Statham has, whether you like it or not, cemented himself as one of the lead stars of the new generation of action films which has shifted away from the slower-paced stage fights that you found in Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger to a hyper-kinetic style where if you blink you can miss lightning fast scenes of brutality. It’s no longer about which action star has the best one-liner after he takes out a bad guy, it’s about which one does the craziest shit and how it looks on film. In that arena, Statham has become the champ. And so it always feels odd when he takes a step away from that frantic pacing for a slower thriller that doesn’t take full advantage of the physicality you know he’s capable of. Blitz has some of the edge that you expect from a Statham vehicle, but it’s decidedly low on action and it seems to try to compensate with some hackneyed cop dialogue in a story that falls to pieces if you think too hard.
Detective Sergeant Brant (Statham) has a reputation of brutality, one aptly illustrated in an opening scene where he leaves his apartment to beat a trio of would-be car thieves senseless with a bat. His actions have gotten him and his police precinct negative publicity in the past, but his record of arrests makes him a liability they willingly bear. When an unknown killer starts taking down London’s finest one-by-one, Brant teams up with the more level-headed Officer DC Porter Nash (Paddy Considine) to find the killer before he can force any more officers into early retirement. As their investigation continues, they stumble across Barry Weiss (Aidan Gillen), a criminal who’s had a past encounter with Brant’s violent ways, and the game of cat and mouse begins, with only a hapless reporter having any clue as to what’s really going on.
The concept of a seasoned criminal taking revenge on the police who’ve arrested him holds interest, but it has to work really hard here to be the dominant force amidst a movie crammed with all sorts of empty subplots, like a friend and fellow officer dealing with her drug addiction amidst a side investigation, that just go nowhere. The film would have benefited from using the time wasted on those plots to further develop and give more face time to Gillen who works well as the overconfident and menacing killer. As is, he doesn’t seem nearly intelligent enough to have planned the scheme the film sets up, because all we ever see him doing that comes close to clever is being mindful of security cameras, which does not a genius make. Gillen’s a talented actor, but the killer known as ‘the Blitz’ doesn’t have enough depth to make a film about his killing spree and arrest fulfilling.
Statham and Considine make a decent duo but it falls flat courtesy of some ridiculous dialogue that feels unnatural and sounds like it came from any number of awful 80s cop films. It’s when the film isn’t trying to develop their shallow relationship and just lets them do the police work that it works at all, but it fails even then. Character motivations pop up and vanish as certain scenes require, and the moral counterbalance that Nash is intended to be for Brant never holds, and so all we’re left with is bad cop and morally ambiguous cop. At which point any inherent drama just goes out the window. It’s not uncommon for Statham films to have this problem, but usually it’s compensated for with some bone-jarring action sequences, something Blitz lacks almost entirely.
There are hints of good elements here, but Director Elliott Lester couldn’t congeal them into a meaningful concoction, and instead Blitz tastes like a number of disparate elements that never fully dissolved into a larger mix.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
You won’t find much substance here, as a few paltry cast & crew interviews that are little more than mutual congratulations and empty posturing about the film’s “innovative” plot and a too typical behind the scenes piece don’t give you much to chew on.
"Blitz" is on sale August 23, 2011 and is rated R. Crime, Thriller. Directed by Elliott Lester. Written by Ken Bruen (novel), Nathan Parker (screenplay). Starring Aidan Gillen, Jason Statham, Paddy Considine.
