Blitz (2024) Movie Review: McQueen’s Mawkish Melodrama Misses the Mark

A filmmaker of unflinching bluntness in his depiction of historical, socio-cultural division and oppression, it’s a wonder that it’s taken Steve McQueen nearly 20 years to finally set his sights upon the many horrors—both political and interpersonal—of the Second World War. Perhaps it came from a reticence to tackle a subject matter so massive in scope, or perhaps it was the desire to wait until he had the clout to demand a worthy budget, but regardless, “Blitz” comes at a critical moment in the career of an Oscar-winning filmmaker finally given the scale to approach a period of history that has long-fascinated him.

Of course, “Blitz” isn’t McQueen’s first go-around in depicting the dreaded six-year period of the early 1940s, as it was preceded by his gargantuan 2023 documentary “Occupied City,” adapting his partner Bianca Stigter’s pop-up book detailing the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. Seeming to anticipate the tepid reaction to the clinical 4-hour doc, McQueen was already, upon its release, deep into production on his other long-gestating WWII passion project—one that trades repetitive austerity for Spielbergian sentimentalism, and one that, consequently, proves to be even more lost in its aims.

Blitz (2024) Movie Review — A still from “Blitz” (2024)

Moving from the Netherlands to his own home nation, McQueen centers “Blitz” on the misadventures of George (capable newcomer Elliott Heffernan), a young boy in London whose mixed-race heritage has left him more than moderately experienced with the notion of fighting a hostile, unaccepting world. By September 1940, George’s problems have grown beyond the immediately cultural, compounded by the ongoing blitzkrieg campaign by Nazi forces over England.

Fearing the worst for her family, George’s mother Rita (a bleedingly sensitive Saoirse Ronan) makes the most difficult choice facing all parents at this moment and sends her only son away on a train bound for the countryside, in the hopes that he’ll be safe from the relentless city bombing while she stays behind to work in a munitions factory. Unwilling to part from his home and ignorant of the magnitude of his mother’s sacrifice, it doesn’t take long for George to decide to abandon the train ride altogether and make his way back home, despite the obstacles, human or non, standing in his way.

McQueen’s greatest strength as a filmmaker has always been his ability to cut through all the bullshit and present the issues in his films in as uncompromising a manner as possible. Even the heist film “Widows” demonstrated a flirtation with more populist filmmaking that could retain—even benefit from—the director’s incisive camera. Suffice it to say, mawkishness isn’t a part of his refined toolbox, which is all the more evident as the longer “Blitz” sinks itself into generic platitudes about survival and community during wartime.

Not to suggest that these notions are completely unworthy of the cinematic treatment, but they’re clearly not areas on which McQueen finds himself particularly adept, as “Blitz” loses itself in the anonymity of a “Keep Calm and Carry On” narrative that benefits only marginally from the artist’s own voice. Not every film is inherently hindered by the lack of an auteur’s distinct stamp, but the issue with “Blitz” isn’t merely that McQueen’s voice is diluted in such sappy studio fare. The issue is that the approach it does take would blend in with any number of other films on the same topic, to the point where its greater motivation to exist in the crowded field of WWII narratives comes into question; scratch his name off the credits and throw in someone like Morten Tyldum, and little, if anything, would feel all that divergent from what we got.

Of course, McQueen’s own preoccupation with Black identity and the persecution faced even in moments where solidarity would be most beneficial to survival comes through the strongest here. (In this sense, “Blitz” functions as an organic, if vastly underwhelming, progression from the filmmaker’s sublime “Small Axe” series.) But the saccharine delivery of it all—McQueen’s frequent cinematographer Sean Bobbitt has been replaced with Yorick Le Saux, whose slick, streamer-ready lens is no match for the former’s cutting crispness—only serves to dilute whatever parts of McQueen’s voice manage to be salvaged from the rubble.

Those of the (incorrect) opinion that films like “Empire of the Sun” rank among Steven Spielberg’s best will probably find some sense of hopeful majesty in Steve McQueen’s well-intentioned ventures with “Blitz.” Those less inclined towards the polished veneer of this common approach, though, may find themselves extremely disappointed at the director’s dilution of a thematic framework so clearly near and dear to his heart. For a filmmaker so willing to stick his hands in the grime that defines human interaction, it’s a shame his plunge into the debris of his native land has left McQueen’s hands so unusually polished.