Harry (Liam Neeson) and Veronica (Viola Davis) are making love. Cut to a heist led by Harry as it explodes into gunfire. The soft hum of endearment veers into the sharp crack of bullets on metal and shattered glass. Widows’ opening scene jumps between domesticity and violence, cutting between Harry and Veronica, between Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and her husband (a member of Harry’s gang), and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) and her gang husband. Domesticity and death can be counted as Widows’ twin motif. The heist is a disaster. With their delinquent men buried, the women must carry on.
Writer-director Steve McQueen’s Widows is a crime thriller that turns some of the thriller expectations on its head. After the story’s bloody onset, Veronica, given one month to pay back the man whose $2 million Harry’s gang stole, discovers her late husband’s elaborately laid plans for his next heist. She recruits the skeptical but hard-up Alice and Linda; Linda enlists her babysitter-hairdresser, Belle (Cynthia Erivo), a savvy and athletic woman who will scout the target and drive the getaway van.
Unlike this summer’s idiotic Peppermint, this is a women’s revenge-crime fantasy that seldom exceeds the bounds of plausibility. Veronica’s ad hoc gang is ethnically integrated—two African Americans, a Latina and a Pole. But class division is apparent. Veronica, a professional with money and a penthouse, condescends to her lower-class helpers and doesn’t entirely understand them. “Our lives are trickier than yours,” Linda tells her.
The robbery caper aspect of Widows—in Veronica’s careful planning and its inevitably inexact execution—takes second place behind a character study of its four female protagonists (their back stories largely left to the imagination) and its setting deep in the muck of Chicago politics. Turns out Harry is linked with Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), the reluctant heir to a political dynasty headed by his fulminating father (Robert Duvall). The Mulligans have dominated the 18th Ward for generations but are challenged in the upcoming election by Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), an orator who speaks in the ecstatic tongues of the black church. They are all bad men, their souls corroded by greed, albeit the sometimes irresolute Jack needs prodding from his hateful father, while Jamal is his own man with a presence of quiet menace.
The blood will always be on other hands. In a particularly memorable scene, Jamal’s sadistic henchman, Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya), orders the two teenage gangstas who lost Manning’s money in Harry’s heist to perform an impromptu rap. As they begin to toss rhymes, Jatemme calmly shoots one in the head and as the other runs for the door, shoots him in the back.
At moments, McQueen winks at the crime thriller genre. Cars explode but not in slo-mo. There is a short car chase but it’s a straight-up ram-job under a dark Chicago underpass, not the computer generated carnage of brain-dead Hollywood. Widows also makes ironic comments on American gun culture, the politics of some African American faith leaders and the entitlement of elites who refuse to let go the levers of power. The opening scene of Widows thrusts the audience headfirst into the plot and the violent, desperate story seldom slackens.
