A half-decent heist . . . shame nobody stole the script
Widows (15) Verdict: Slick, but flawed ★★★✩✩ Juliet, Naked (15) Verdict: Forgettable romcom ★★✩✩✩
THOSE of you with long memories might recall the ITV mini- series Widows, which ran between 1983 and 1985 and was created by Lynda La Plante.
It was about a group of women whose husbands, all professional crooks, were killed during an armed robbery. So the women, despite their inexperience as criminals, took on the next job themselves.
hardly anyone, as far as I’m aware, has been waiting for this rather implausible tale to get the silverscreen treatment, but here it is anyway, relocated to modernday Chicago.
Viola Davis plays Veronica Rawlins, whose husband harry ( Liam Neeson) was ringleader of a gang of thieves, and who decides, on being menaced by a mobster whose money harry pinched, that she should use the heist plans he left behind.
British director Steve McQueen, who has certainly chosen a very different project from his last film, 2013’s Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave, keeps it rolling along pretty watchably. he is aided by a tip-top cast which also includes Daniel Kaluuya, Colin Farrell, elizabeth Debicki and the great Robert Duvall.
The problem is that McQueen and his co-writer (the Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn) cram in too many issues — in fact there’s a whole series of Panorama’s worth in there: racism, sexism, political corruption, domestic abuse, bad parenting, you name it.
This means that the central story doesn’t have enough room to breathe, and therefore never seems
real. Still, you might enjoy suspending your disbelief.
JULIET, NAKED is another far-fetched tale, Jesse Peretz’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel about a woman, Annie (rose Byrne), shacked up with a music nerd, duncan ( Chris o’dowd), who ends up forging an unlikely relationship with the object of the nerd’s all-consuming obsession. This is a reclusive American singer- songwriter called Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke) who hasn’t made music since his definitive album, Juliet, decades earlier.
Byrne, an Australian actress based in the U.S., is miscast. Quite apart from the over-rehearsed glottal stops, she is simply too distractingly beautiful to believe in as a faintly unhappy woman running a feeble museum in an obscure English seaside town, co-habiting with a genial dullard.
o’dowd and Hawke struggle manfully with their roles, and with a script by Jim Taylor and the director’s sister Evgenia Peretz that conspicuously lacks Hornby’s own expertise with dialogue and scene-setting, not to mention the usual magic touch of producer Judd Apatow.
The film is at its (distinctly limited) best when it settles for being nothing more than a lightweight romcom. Alas, it strains too hard for poignancy, and makes ill-advised efforts to explore the nature of fandom and fame.