Blitz review | Steve McQueen’s explosive WWII drama fizzles out

Blitz steve mcqueen
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Steve McQueen is back in the director’s chair for an alternately compelling and cliché-peppered WWII drama. Here’s our Blitz review.


It’s worth mentioning now that this isn’t 2011 “cop-killer versus killer-cop” Jason Statham vehicle of the same name, because these two films could hardly be more different. If video rentals were still around, we’d be seeing a lot of very confused fans from both camps.

Parts of Blitz (2024), though, are just as thrilling as watching the Stath run around after a London-based serial killer, if you can imagine such a thing. Using a conflicted mother (Saoirse Ronan)’s hunt for her runaway eight-year-old as a setup, McQueen’s latest is something of an anthology film disguised as a conventional A-to-B drama. On his travels, young George (Elliott Heffernan) encounters folk from across the capital’s social strata, from a kindly air raid warden (Benjamin Clementine) to a gang of less-kindly criminal types (Kathy Burke, Stephen Graham). Taken in isolation, each moment paints a very different, but far from deliberately contrarian, view of “the Blitz spirit” than we’re used to.

Ronan’s Rita, meanwhile, is on her own adventure. With her son (supposedly) en-route to an evacuee’s life in the country, she volunteers at a local air raid shelter to keep herself occupied, before discovering George is loose in the urban metropolis. She finds working class families fighting for the right to take cover underground, and a charismatic communist (Leigh Gill) trying to stir hope in a city under siege.

All the while, London’s residents live under the constant threat of bombs from above. We’re so used to seeing the Blitz in its aftermath – cheery, black-and-white Londoners clearing rubble from the shells of their former homes – it’s easy to forget the terror of life in a city with bombs raining down night after night. It’s in the film’s portrait of humanity pushed to its extremes, in good ways and in bad, that McQueen really excels in showing us something special. The film’s opening moments, where a team of firefighters out of their depth attempt to control a roaring blaze, start the show with such genuine heat that it’s difficult for Blitz to live up to its promise.

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In its quieter moments, the film starts to struggle. Its anthology structure collides with a tone like a BBC family drama, and the result falls into the gap. Occasional Poppins-esque “blimey guv’nor” dialogue jars when we’re not given enough time with each character to forgive their quirks. What should give us a broader sense of the many stories at play instead relegates George in particular to a passenger in his own tale, meeting Londoners on the way who feel more like caricatures than real people.

This is especially grating because George and Rita’s story is by far the most interesting of the lot. The struggles of a mixed-race young boy and his single mother feel ripe for emotional heft far more than the Dickensian cast of urchins and ne’er do wells they encounter en route. It seems like, in the effort to tell everyone’s story, McQueen’s ended up telling no one’s at all.

It all ends up feeling a little Sunday-teatime drama, really. The level of filmmaking and a largely brilliant cast mean there are about eight excellent films in here somewhere – taken together, there’s almost, but not quite, one great one.

Blitz premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on 9th October, before heading to UK cinemas 1st November.

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