McQueen's First Bad Film

End of the year awards are being given by critics groups and I'm behind. I feel more behind than usual.

One film that isn't on any end-of-the-year lists yet, though, is Widows. No one has mentioned it so far, although perhaps that is about to change as the Golden Globes drop their nominees on Thursday.

Why so serious, Ms. Davis?

But Widows totally didn't work for me, and I guess I understand why it isn't standing out for critics. Steve McQueen's new movie is his least interesting film to date. It was a labor of love for him, he says, since he fell in love with the miniseries on which it is based in the 1980s when he was a kid, but Widows is really nothing more than a genre picture, and it doesn't quite do its genre very well. It's filled with solid twists and reversals (the script is by Gillian Flynn), but for me it never really took off.

I think the reason for this is that almost all of the main characters in Widows are miscast. Colin Farrell, Cynthia Erivo, and Elizabeth Debicki work well, and all three are good in the movie (Debicki, in fact, is best in show). But Viola Davis, Liam Neeson, Michelle Rodriguez, and especially Daniel Kaluuya are all miscast to my mind.

Ms. Rodriguez and Ms. Debicki

It's odd because I thought the supporting actors were almost uniformly great. I loved Lukas Haas and Carrie Coon and Jon Michael Hill and Garrett Dillahunt (love seeing him) and Jacki Weaver and Brian Tyree Henry and (of course) Jon Bernthal. There's never enough Jon Bernthal. In anything.

But the main cast... Viola Davis is too serious. Way too serious. She never lets us see her let loose. She's tightly wound the whole movie... so much so that it seems impossible – and I never for a moment believed – that she could or would try the crime she tries in the film. Michelle Rodriguez is great. I love her. But did I believe that she ran a dress shop and gave all her money to her husband for years and years? Did I believe that she could easily be cowed by a bitchy mother in law? I did not. Do I believe Liam Neeson could play a criminal? Of course. He's made a career on revenging father movies. But in Widows, Neeson's acting just can't quite manage what McQueen asks of him.

Mr. Kaluuya and Mr. Henry

And then there's Daniel Kaluuya, who plays the film's very scary hitman, a man who terrifies character after character with simple verbal threats, a man who stabs numerous people just for fun, who kills some scared kids who are just rapping by themselves in a back room. Trouble is, Kaluuya isn't the least bit terrifying. He's shorter than every character he tries to intimidate in Widows, and he dances around and spends so much time posturing, that I found his entire portrayal utterly without credibility. He's almost friendly. It doesn't work even a little.

There are several bright spots. The much-vaunted shot of Chicago from the hood of Colin Farrell's car is pretty great (and I love McQueen's technique of not allowing the audience in on a conversation so that we pay attention to something else – he used this in Hunger, too). I also liked the film's interest in corrupt Chicago politics. And I didn't understand Cynthia Erivo's character at all, but she has a few great scenes. Elizabeth Debicki gets all the best scenes, and she turns her character out beautifully. But none of these bright spots outweighs the sheer length of Widows, which never really picks up steam and hits a stride. It just seems to go on and on without building tension, without speeding up at all, and without articulating any real stakes. It's a Gillian Flynn machine, in other words, that runs on cruise control and never kicks into high gear. I was, quite frankly, bored.