Heist and lows

Steve McQueen’s ‘Widows’ delivers a serviceable yet unfulfilling heist film

With “Widows”, the female-driven heist film starring Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Liam Neeson and Colin Farrell, Oscar winning British auteur Steve McQueen trades out his typical art-house, awards season offerings for more populist genre fare. And while McQueen delivers a very serviceable, sometimes even gripping thriller, “Widows” falls short of its high art/genre entertainment aspirations, ultimately suffering from a languid, underdeveloped script.

The film follows three disparate Chicago women (Davis, Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki) reeling from the aftermath of losing their husbands, lead by Liam Neeson, who die tragically in a heist gone wrong. These three women are forced to come together and pull off a highly complex score in order to repay the debt owed to crime boss, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry).

“Widows” endeavors to explore the nature of grief, loss, and identity in the wake of losing a spouse and taking the future into your own hands. As expected, the film features a great showpiece performance by Davis, who always gives 100% and who acquits herself admirably without much else to do throughout the film but grimace and carry around her cotton ball of a dog named Olivia.

The real scene stealer here is Debicki, the towering Australian actress who has the meatiest role as a codependent trophy wife who not only has to settle up her abusive husband’s outstanding debt but also repossess her own autonomy in a chauvinistic world that can’t see past her stunning beauty.

Unfortunately, these performances are saddled with a plot that feels more perfunctory than intricate and we end up enduring over an hour of grief and handwringing before the thrilling “will they pull it off, or won’t they” heist kicks in. By then, there’s no real time to construct any real suspense around the heist, and while there are some interesting twists and double crosses it ultimately feels more rote than rewarding.

From the outset, “Widows” promised to flip the heist film on its head. With its central gender swapping conceit and a powerhouse cast teaming up with one of our most interesting modern filmmakers, the film should have been a slam dunk, but the script, co-written by McQueen and Gillian Flynn—bestselling novelist of “Gone Girl” and “Sharp Objects”—feels like the end result of reading “Heist Films for Dummies.” There’s a whole political subplot with Colin Farrell and Brian Tyree Henry that belongs in an entirely different movie yet feels shoehorned into this already overstuffed film.

Steve McQueen is masterful at crafting challenging arthouse fare that can be gorgeous to look at. Here he teams again with cinematographer Sean Bobbitt—who also shot McQueen’s “12 years a slave,” “Shame,” and “Hunger." With “Widows,” they display an obsessive eye for detail, filing the film with gorgeous high-rise apartments and gritty Chicago locations with drawn-out closeups that luxuriate in the individual grieving process of Davis, Debicki, and Rodriguez; but while the film is certainly a beautiful bauble to look at, in the end “Widows” feels more like frippery than an well-crafted gem of a film.