Widows 2018
It seems like there has been a bit of a lull in movie releases lately and it has been hard to find good new releases. Widows has been getting good reviews but otherwise I went in knowing very little about the movie. It feels a little like a caper movie by someone who doesn’t know about caper movies, which isn’t necessarily bad, but is a little jarring. The movie centers around some women whose husbands are killed in a botched robbery and the victim of the robbery wants his money back or he will kill them. So the first thing is the setup is off. Why are the women being held responsible? Then these women, who have no history as criminals have to pull off a big job to get the bad guys off their back. Unlike a typical caper movie, none of these people have any particular skills or experience that will help them, so it takes a long time for the movie to get going and the focus seems a little too much on the bad guys, though maybe it has to since there isn’t much of a story here about the titular women. Once you finally get into the meat of the plot maybe more than halfway through, things do get interesting and pretty much stay that way through the ending. Some of the motivations and mechanics of the movie are a little questionable or confusing, but for the most part it seems to work. It is great to see Viola Davis in a lead role, but she still has plenty of crying scenes. The rest of the cast is solid though Viola’s character is the only one that really develops at all. There are scenes with a lot of the side characters, but not really for much of a reason. This is an enjoyable, kind of unorthodox, but somehow conventional crime movie, but the tone and pacing are a little off, so I think it just gets a B.
Written: 01 Dec 2018