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Blitz has an intriguing concept; a serial killer who’s killing police men and women. With a nice twist here and there this could have been a British equivalent of David Fincher’s classic Se7en. Sadly though Blitz derails in the last half hour due to some sloppy scriptwriting which gives us plot hole upon plot hole. If the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland was in front of this script he would have a hard time deciding which hole he should go through.
But Blitz is at first a Jason Statham movie. There are two types of Statham movies; ones that he actually acts in and ones that are action movies and he is a throwback to the 80’s; a one man killing machine. Mostly it’s the latter but this time they actually tried to get the best of both worlds. Statham plays Detective Sergeant Tom Brant and detectives solve cases with their brains and not so much with their brawn. Well Brant here has a thing for police harassment as he demonstrates in the opening scene where he puts three carjacking youths in a hospital with a hurley stick. This gives him the opportunity to spout one-liners like “If you’re picking the wrong fight… at least pick the right weapon.” It seems that this is everyday police works as he got a whole history of violent apprehensions. And as is usual with these kinds of cops they can’t seem to work a computer and need someone else to look up a simple name in a database. At one point he’s even called a dinosaur. Haven’t heard that one before.
Blitz does not hide the identity of the killer for long. His first murder is covered in shadows, but the second one is in broad daylight. And funny enough the police are on to him pretty quickly, but they just can’t seem to get the evidence to put him away. This is where Blitz begins to derail.
Everybody starts making stupid decisions from this point one and there are holes in the plot so big even Fat Albert could get through with ease.
Be aware there might be some spoilers here; At one point “The Blitz”, as he has named himself, has been caught but is released due to lack of evidence. During this scene he gets a confiscated envelope back with 50.000 pounds which he took from a guy whom he murdered not too long before that and which is known by the authorities. It’s a bit stupid seeing him wave all the money around while the police are pondering that it’s just fucked up they don’t have any evidence.
But when you look at the previous 60 minutes I can only conclude the police is really stupid. He called a journalist multiple times who at one point started recording the phone calls and incriminated himself multiple times in those calls and he didn’t even use a voice distortion tool. There’s the fact that all the cops that have been killed or he attempted to kill have arrested him at one point. After his release the police are tailing him but he at one moment brings the bag with all the evidence back to his house and nobody ever went up to him to asks what’s in the bag.
It goes a bit down from there as he turns up, dressed as a police officer, at the funeral of the last cop he killed and nobody notices him. Even the explanation of how the twist ending was going to be sold was a bit lame and would never work.
And then there’s the subplot of female agent Falls which has obsolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story. It could have been cut out and nobody would have missed it. But maybe it was a way of having at least one developed character in the movie. One character I must point out though; Porter Nash. Once he enters the scene he’s being ridiculed and generally hated by the entire police department. Guess he went Serpico and turned on some of his colleagues? No, the guy is just gay. Really, I was wondering what he had done when he entered with such hostility but the guy just likes men. Even Statham constantly emphasis the guy’s sexuality.
But be as it might, Blitz is a fast paced thriller which might not live up to its premise and gives us unnecessary sub-plots and plot holes it still is a fun movie. Guess that’s more a credit to Statham and his supporting cast.
