Doing it for themselves

Slick all-female heist movie based on 1980s TV drama mostly works a treat

AH, Widows. One of Thames TV’s finest. The 1980s. Old London town. Hard-faced women with lacquerhardened hair, doing the robbery their wrong ’un husbands messed up. Luvvly jubbly. Not quite the kind of cinematic manor you automatically associate with Steve McQueen, king of cool and director of the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, Hunger and Shame.

But what do you know, McQueen’s reworking of queen of crime Lynda La Plante’s tale mostly works a treat, which just goes to show that a strong idea will always hold up in the right hands. Especially if those hands belong to Viola Davis, who delivers a superb performance in the lead, and Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl and co-writer of the screenplay with McQueen. When first we meet Veronica (Davis) she is in bed with her partner Harry (Liam Neeson). As they canoodle, McQueen fast-forwards to an armed robbery, led by Harry, which is being carried out with extreme violence. Lover, fighter, robber; the many faces of Harry are on display.

The job goes wrong and the partners become the widows of the title. As if that is not enough to contend with, Veronica is told that Harry and company owed a lot of money to people who are very serious about seeing it returned. The debt is now assigned to her, and she is given a month to get the cash together. But she has nothing to her name save an old notebook of Harry’s in which he wrote the details of jobs yet to be done. Can she persuade the other, equally cash-strapped widows to join forces with her and pull off a robbery? As it turns out, not a lot of persuasion is needed. Indeed, the women seem to come round to the idea of armed robbery, and adapt to a life of crime, rather too quickly. Hardly any time is spent weighing up what they have to lose if things go wrong.

In the end, Davis and her co-stars make it easy to leap across the credibility gap through the sheer strength of their performances. Elizabeth Debicki plays Alice, who spent her marriage being afraid of her husband’s temper. Linda (Michelle