Widows is an all-star bonanza that never quite finds its tone: EW review
It’s not clear exactly what kind of movie(s) Widows wants to be: feminist heist thriller? Sprawling political saga? Bare-knuckled gangster noir? Steve McQueen’s latest is so stuffed with stars, styles, and big ideas, it’s almost impossible not to admire what he’s going for. But the Oscar-winning director of 12 Years a Slave and Shame can only throw so much spaghetti at the wall before you wish he’d stopped at al dente.
A story centered on Viola Davis can’t go too wrong, at least; she’s Veronica, a former teachers’-union rep still keeping it sexy in her marriage to a man (Liam Neeson) who may or may not be a criminal mastermind. Within minutes, he and his crew are wiped out on a job gone wrong — there’s a reason this thing’s not called Amicably Divorced — and the surviving spouses are left to reckon with debts unpaid to local kingpin Jamal Manning (a softly menacing Brian Tyree Henry) and his sociopathic brother/enforcer Jatemme (Get Out‘s Daniel Kaluuya).
While Veronica works overtime to turn a harried single mother (Michelle Rodriguez), a moonlighting babysitter (Cynthia Erivo), and an emotionally fragile trophy wife (Elizabeth Debicki) into a makeshift suicide squad, the script zigs between concurrent subplots about the Mannings and a Chicago family dynasty whose dirty fingerprints are all over city politics (Robert Duvall is the mad paterfamilias; Colin Farrell, trying on a flat Midwestern accent, is his reluctant prodigal son).
