Blitz: A Review - Bombs Away!

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: ½ out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An ill-conceived, poorly executed and outrageously awful movie.

If you’re yearning for a story about Nazi Germany’s brutal blitzkrieg bombing assault on London during World War II that is so pretentious and preposterous that it will have you rooting for the bad guys to go full on Enola Gay and Hiroshima the Brits into oblivion…have I got the movie for you.

Blitz, written and directed by acclaimed auteur Steve McQueen, tells the story of George, a young mixed-race boy, and his single white mother, Rita, who try to survive the chaos and calamity of the Blitz.

My wee Scottish grandmother, one of my all-time favorite people, lived in London during the Blitz and when I was a child would tell me stories of frantically running to the underground with her two horrified toddlers and one wailing infant (my uncles) in tow in order to survive the German bombing raids.

Her harrowing experience had me deeply interested in watching Blitz. As did the fact that one of my favorite actresses, Saoirse Ronan, stars in it, and that the film’s writer/director, Steve McQueen, was a once upon a time a filmmaker I revered for his artistic courage and vision.

Then I sat down and watched Blitz – which is streaming on Apple TV+…and holy shit balls is it egregiously, atrociously bad.

This movie is so ill-conceived, poorly designed, erroneously executed, didactic, patronizing, pedantic and pedestrian that it left me frustrated to the point of being furious. It is difficult to put into words how much I hated this movie…but I’ll try because I truly and absolutely despised it.

The film, which runs two-hours, makes the ludicrous decision to make the story of the Blitz, a terror bombing which killed 40,000 Brits – the overwhelming majority (literally 99%) of whom were white, about a little black-skinned boy suffering a bevy of racist micro-aggressions while on an odyssey through London. I shit you not.

It would be hard to misunderstand and misrepresent the meaning of the Blitz more than to use it as a weapon to bash the very people it brutalized. This movie is the equivalent of telling a story about the Holocaust and having it focus on a mixed-race Polish kid in Krakow bemoaning the Jewish racism he endured at the hands of the Jews being forced into the ghetto and onto the trains headed to Auschwitz.

The film’s pretentiousness and its patronizing tone are astonishing, and seemed designed to please a particularly putrid audience from our recent past.

This is one of those films that vacuous liberal white people would’ve exalted in the most glowing terms back in 2019, no doubt during breaks at their book club meetings where they self-righteously discussed the brilliance of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist and lamented how everyone else besides them is so racist.

This is the type of movie where the white people are almost unanimously atrocious and despicable villains, and minorities, be they Indian, Jewish or African, are noble saints with hearts of gold.

The heart of gold lineup includes but is not limited to…the Jew with a heart of gold who stands up to defend an Indian family – who also have hearts of gold. There’s a Nigerian nightwatchman with a heart so golden he is essentially Jesus Christ. Then there’s a communist midget…again I shit you not…with a heart of gold considerably bigger than his tiny little body. There’s also a black woman who is a criminal but she too ends up having, you guessed it…a heart of gold!

The Anglo-Saxon/white Brits on the other hand…well, they are, with the exception of Rita and her father, a vile, vindictive, violent, vicious and venomous bunch. Whether it’s the street criminal Albert, who seems like something out of a second-rate Dickens novel, or the bevy of pale civil servants tasked with public safety, or the white men in various positions of power, the white characters are a cruel and heartless bunch, that lie easily and incessantly. They are all filled to the brim with a savage and irrational hate for anyone not white that burns brighter and hotter than any Nazi fire bombing.

On top of the incomparably trite and passe agenda fueling the film, there’s the issue of the plot being so ludicrous and preposterous as to be incandescently stupid.

George’s odyssey is essentially like Pinocchio’s, as he goes from one inanity to the next, making awful, idiotic decisions every chance he gets. But, of course, because George is of mixed-race, he has a heart of gold and is outlandishly courageous and brave, while the white kids are just cruel and mean-spirited.

George’s odyssey is the main narrative in the film, and it is incessantly nonsensical and moronic. Elliot Heffernan, who plays George, is a stone-faced dullard who does nothing but grate and irritate viewers every second he’s on-screen. I’ve never wished for a child to be killed in a movie before…but this dope had me rooting for it.

The more interesting, but equally inane, narrative, is that of George’s mom, Rita. I love Saoirse Ronan, and she does the best she can with what’s she’s given, but Rita’s story, which is filled with a bevy of lifeless flashbacks, is so vapid it made my teeth hurt.  And, of course, it is filled with a cavalcade of loathsome white men and their unending racism and sexism and the like. Yawn.

Steve McQueen was once a filmmaker I deeply respected and admired. His first feature, Hunger (2008), which chronicles the struggle of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, is a masterful, exquisitely executed, immensely moving film. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

His next film, Shame (2011), is a shocking, vivid depiction of the chaotic life of a sex addict that is also well-crafted.  

His third film, 12 Years a Slave (2013), won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It is a bit of a controversial pick in hindsight because apparently making slave movies is a no-no among the DEI sect nowadays. But back then, it was an impressive film that was very deftly put together, and I loved it then…and still do today.

Then things started to go off the rails for McQueen. His next movie, Widows (2018), was, frankly, a mess of a movie. It tried, and failed, to say a lot of things about a lot of subjects, and generally ended up being politically flaccid, dramatically incoherent and cinematically impotent.

Which brings us to Blitz. Blitz is proof of something that makes me quite unhappy, namely that Steve McQueen is not the noteworthy filmmaker I wished him to be, but rather a painfully pedestrian and banal artistic poseur devoid of any truly compelling or original vision.

The reality is that the brilliant Steve McQueen of Hunger is dead and buried, and all we have left is the man who made Blitz, a cloying, trite and treacly film that feels like a sub-par parody of one of those racially-motivated and quickly forgotten BBC movies of the week.

The bottom line is that Blitz is an embarrassingly bad, painfully pretentious and preposterous film that I cannot recommend to anyone at any time. This movie is an abject failure in every way and, like the vast majority of the films of Apple TV+, is a complete and total waste of time. Skip it…I know I wish I had.

©2024