This is a guest post from the Internet’s Katie Taylor. She Twitters here, and blogs at The Secret Little Portobello Mushroom.
“Do I look like I carry a pencil?”
Jason Statham is a man of few characters. What he can do is jump, kick, hit things, mistime one-liners and occasionally wear a nice article of knitwear should the mood take him. In Blitz, all of these talents are taken into consideration and used to their fullest potential, in what I’d like to say is a fast-paced, gritty, urban British thriller, but what is, in fact, a great excuse to see Paddy Considine in a slim-fitting suit with some action sequences involving various household implements.
What needs to be understood here is that Blitz is an excellent Statham movie. If you like Statham (as I do) you know what this means, and therefore don’t mind that it’s sluggish, that whole areas of plot are just left fraying and unfinished, or that the narrative is so simple a dog with a paint-dipped toothbrush held gingerly between its front paws could have drawn a better set of character arcs on the pavement outside of Chicken Cottage. You’ll forgive all that because you don’t have any expectations, and simply hope it’ll be like Transporter 2 because in that one he knocks a guy out by swishing his jacket at his knees.
In Blitz, there is one theme, and that is that violence is cool and can solve everything. Obviously you already thought it was a bit cool, but no, it’s really cool. The main characters are Paddy Considine and Jason Statham, whose character names are not important as it literally does not matter even one single tiny bit. Considine plays a gay police chief who is promoted to the head of Statham’s department when Statham’s superior is placed on compassionate leave after his policewife is shot dead at point blank range. Statham is not given the position as he is on some sort of unexplained probationary kick for being incredibly angry at everything all the time, and beating up child car thieves with a hurley stick. It transpires that a lot of bobbies are being knocked off, so Considine and Statham have to work together to catch the killer BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE (before one of the characters you’ve been encouraged to empathise with is bludgeoned to death by a cunt in purple underpants).
Considine and Statham aren’t at all alike though. Oh no! Statham is balding and talks like he tried to eat an entire heron for breakfast. He walks with the gait of a man who has at least once in his life put his girlfriend in a dutch oven. He wears cardigans, angrily. Considine on the other hand, is classy and speaks quietly. He is good at his job. He is gay (and this is pointed out quite a lot), and has a nice tidy house. One thing they do both have in common is their shared agreement that violence is cool. Considine once popped a paedo’s bollocks off, so you know that despite his suits and cafetiére, he can be respected. Statham is okay with this.
All the other characters who are not members of the police force live in Balfron Tower, which makes sense, because that’s where all Londoners who don’t subsist in the Gherkin live. Here, there is a snitch who looks like Gollum’s Scouse uncle, the murderprick who looks like Nathan Barley if he ate a few more biscuits, and number of useful boxing gym/boozer informants. At one point they mention Nunhead, but they don’t really go to Nunhead and then there’s an overhead shot of Barbican. Later, there’s a chase scene or something and they run through urban London where there is a brothel and a record shop that also sells heroin. Oh, one of the policewomen is a heroin addict. Sorry. That should have been mentioned earlier.
Anyway, instead of giving away the ending outright, let’s just say that throughout the film there are a lot of fights with crowbars, one epic hammer death, several point blank head explosions and a lawyer getting eaten by two dogs called Posh and Becks. Apparently this is justice. Welcome to the jungle, kids. Um, London, kids. Um… a car park and some famous brutalist architecture. Kids.
