Blitz: A Bombardment of Bad

I’m not entirely sure who the audience of Blitz is. I didn’t like it, and judging by the empty cinema, the general public didn’t like it either. And having sat through 98 minutes of this turgid and nasty clichéd cops and robbers drama, I’m not entirely sure the director likes it either. Blitz is a blitzkrieg of bad.

Amazingly, this is apparently based on a book, which I’m going to assume was either loosely based or that the book in question was just drawing after drawing of Dirty Harry shooting robbers with Big Ben in the background. Jason Statham plays Jason Statham, a maverick copper who doesn’t play by the rules, exacting his own kind of rough justice. This being post Football Factory era of British cinema, this means Statham pummeling some car-jackers senseless. The film then shows him in the age old cliché of meeting and getting shouted at by his boss, who warns him “If I write my report, you might get a suspension,” the most British sentence I have ever heard in a film ever.

On the opposite side of the fence is Porter Nash (Paddy Considine), a by the book cop who is unpopular in the force and inevitably going to be assigned the case with Statham, they’re going to hate each other, and then learn from each other. Except that they then proceed to get on rather well, despite the fact Jason Statham is homophobic to him in most of the scenes, and Nash is then relegated to an ever decreasing amount of screen time. This is the level of forethought that has gone into the script for this film.

The film then proceeds to throw several different characters at you at once, which all have their own stories that are at times hard to either follow or care about. We have the vice cop just out of rehab and looking after a young boy whose has turned towards crime. We have the old cop mourning his dead wife and choosing between drink or work to ease the pain. The main one, and the crux of the story, is that a madman is hunting down and killing police officers. He makes a statement to a hack journo (Genuinely introduced as having a porn website open at his desk. In an open plan office) that he intends to kill more. This is the only real moment that Blitz is at least clear about, and is actually a decent premise for a movie.

The rest of the film is an absolute shambles. It kind of has the elements of a film: it’s well shot, it tries to develop its characters, and it builds tension between a lack of evidence to prosecute madman Barry Weiss (Aiden Gillen) and an urgency to stop him before he kills again. I could also say it was shown in a cinema, and had actors in it, which proves it’s a film. But that would be too kind and therefore inconsiderate. Instead, I prefer to tell the truth.

The first problem is that Blitz never aspires to be more than just a load of British gangster film clichés mixed with a hackneyed detective drama. It makes classic mistakes like telegraphing things to the audience before they happen, giving the audience information about the plot and then feeling compelled to tell other characters in the story so they know as well, which just serves to bore us beyond tedium.

Secondly, there is no real level of focus. If Blitz was about two different contrasting police styles forced to team up together to stop a man killing police officers, and then had as a side story the young vice copper trying to rebuild her life, you then would have a much clearer and stronger story. Instead, it juggles all the plots together with no sense of cohesion, and reeks of padding for a film running out of steam. When a film that’s 98 minutes long feels padded, you’re in a lot of trouble.

However bad the writing gets though, it pales in comparison to the car crash of directing. I understand that South East London is bit rougher than your average wine bar loving West London population, but the nasty and grim environment that Blitz thrives in is God awful. Nearly every character is unlikable; Jason Statham is a particular bugbear as having a character that is clearly meant to be an antihero, but comes off as extremely loathsome. The characters seem to dislike each other too, talking to each other with blatant disregard for soft speak like “hello” and “please” and preferred instead to engage through expletives like a teenager whose mother is out of earshot.

It is also constantly zipping back and forth between being controversial and simply superficial. The violence is often glorified or lingering just a little bit too long, and it never really establishes a theme other than it supposedly “looks really cool.” The film does have a decent scene where the killer takes out a cop in his own home and then watches the countdown afterwards, an act that showed his madness with much more depth than in any other part of the film. But a couple of cool scenes is way too little and a lot too late for Blitz, which hangs it’s hat on good cinematography and a banging soundtrack over character, story, and direction. When a detective drama has its moment of defeat and that most sombre instant is accompanied by a dub-step grunge, then you begin to see why Blitz has failed so badly.