Blitz review: Steve McQueen's wartime epic doesn't know what it wants to be

Herded onto a train, George, whose mother is white and absent father is black, faces prejudice from some of the kids alongside him. He snaps, jumping the train while it’s moving, aiming to get back to London to find his mum.

At home, Rita gets word that he’s gone missing and is worried sick. We see in flashback that George came from a brief liaison she had with a man she met in a jazz club. The only man in the boy’s life is his grandfather (Paul Weller), who warns George to stand up to bullies because they’re “all mouth and no trousers”.

Rita works in the munitions factory, building the bombs that will repel the Nazis. It’s one of McQueen’s better scenes, showing the camaraderie between the all-female workforce as they laugh and even, in Rita’s case, sing to keep the spirits up.

Unfortunately, even here, McQueen’s overripe characterisation lets the film down. Joshua McGuire, for example, as the foreman where Rita works feels like he’s doing a below-par impersonation of Arthur Lowe. It gets worse later on when George makes his way back to the city, only to teleport into Victorian London, it seems, as he meets a group of rogues, led a Fagin-like Stephen Graham, who soon gets the boy picking a pocket or two. Kathy Burke is even broader as a Dickensian grotesque; subtle this isn’t.

Blitz’s technical prowess means that its epic quality impresses. Right from the opening scene, when a fireman loses control of his hose trying to quell the fiery chaos of the blitz, the film adeptly captures the horrors that everyday folk lived through.

A scene where the underground station is flooded is a highlight, as McQueen draws from the action chops he developed for his last film, the 2018 thriller Widows. Credit is also due to production designer Adam Stockhausen, who does a fine job of recreating the bombed-out landscape.

Much of Blitz is about showing a diverse portrait of London in the 1940s, one that hasn’t often been focused on. If the depiction of WW2 has often been showing a united front against the common enemy, McQueen depicts a society where that was not the case.

Racism bubbles away barely below the surface, while anti-Semitism is also shown to be rife (the film briefly features Mickey Davies, played by Leigh Gill, a real-life figure who helped turn Spitalfields Fruit and Wool Exchange into a shelter).

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While George experiences the kindness of strangers, not least from a Nigerian warden Ife (Benjamin Clémentine) who helps him in his hour of need, Rita’s story goes nowhere. She has a flirtation with a fireman – played by Harris Dickinson, in a largely thankless role – but otherwise she’s left to fret.

The impression McQueen leaves is of a film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be: wartime romance, mother-son story, social document.

In truth, Blitz is the most commercial of McQueen’s movies, and far less potent than his 2008 debut Hunger, its follow-up Shame or the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave. The film’s picaresque structure does it few favours. At one point, he is seen staring at the bright lights of Hamley’s toy store in Regent Street.

It feels like a fairytale, all very unreal – despite the true horrors that London was facing.

Blitz is now showing in UK cinemas.

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