Blitz works because it leans all the way into what Jason Statham does best: a battered, foul-mouthed cop who solves problems with his fists first and his badge a distant second. Director Elliott Lester shoots London as a grey, rain-slicked machine grinding down everyone in it, and that atmosphere does a lot of heavy lifting for a plot that's fairly standard serial-killer-hunts-cops material. Based on Ken Bruen's novel, the film keeps the source's hard-boiled, unsentimental streak rather than smoothing it into something more conventional. It's not reinventing the genre, but it commits fully to its own bleak, blunt-force register.
The real spark is the pairing of Statham with Paddy Considine, whose careful, exhausted Inspector Nash gives the film a second gear it badly needs. Considine plays against Statham's chaos with a stillness that makes their scenes together the most interesting thing on screen, and their mismatched-partners dynamic carries more weight than the killer's reveal ever does. Aidan Gillen, cast as the title character, brings an unsettling, needling energy to a role that could have been a generic slasher-movie villain in less careful hands. It's a small but well-assembled cast working above the material's ceiling.
Statham at his most bruised and blunt, propped up by a terrific Paddy Considine.
This is a rainy-night watch for people who want Statham doing what Statham does, minus the globe-trotting spectacle of his bigger action vehicles. It's grittier and more procedural than his usual output, closer to a hard crime novel than a stunt reel. Don't expect the mystery to surprise you — the pleasure here is tone and performance, not plotting. If you like British crime thrillers with a rough, unglamorous edge and don't mind a story that plays its beats fairly straight, Blitz delivers a solid, unfussy couple of hours.
Blitz is based on the 2002 novel of the same name by Irish crime writer Ken Bruen, the first entry in his Brant series featuring Detective Sergeant Tom Brant and his colleagues in the London police. The film adaptation was directed by Elliott Lester and shot on location in London in August 2010. It marked the first theatrical film release for Lionsgate UK, which distributed the picture in its home market in May 2011. Jason Statham stars as Brant, with Paddy Considine as Inspector Porter Nash and Aidan Gillen as the elusive cop-killer known only by the nickname that gives the film its title.
Reception on release was mixed, with the film settling around a 48% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes — reviewers generally credited the cast, particularly Statham and Considine, while finding the central mystery fairly conventional. Commercially, Blitz grossed roughly $15.8 million worldwide theatrically, with additional revenue from home video sales. It sits within the wave of gritty British crime thrillers that gave Statham a chance to work in a more grounded, procedural register than the international action franchises he's best known for, closer in spirit to his earlier UK crime-film roots than to a Transporter or Expendables sequel.
The film also gives David Morrissey a proper subplot as Harold Dunlop, a tabloid reporter who makes contact with the killer and tries to milk the story for his own career rather than taking what he knows straight to the police, adding a sleazy media-ethics angle to the manhunt that the trailers barely touch on. The script was written by Nathan Parker adapting Bruen's novel, rather than being built from scratch around Statham's usual growled one-liners, and that grounding in real crime fiction is part of why the dialogue has more bite than the average Statham vehicle. It's a reminder that even his lesser-remembered films tend to have a real writer and a real book behind the tough-guy exterior.
