Ada (Kate Beckinsale) is a single mother living in East London with her adorable Deaf daughter Charlotte (Isabelle Moxley) — but she has a dark past, and in “Wildcat,” we first meet her not on the school run or at a parent-teacher evening, but in the middle of a high-stakes diamond heist. In this passable caper from director James Nunn and writery Dominic Burns, she’s the leader of a small and slightly odd crew comprising her handsome American ex Roman (“Mortal Kombat” star Lewis Tan), safe pair of hands Curtis (Bailey Patrick) and her vulnerable livewire brother Edward (Rasmus Hardiker), who will later be blessed, insensitively but not inaccurately, with the nickname Looney Tunes.
The essential plot of “Wildcat” is not unusual: A loved one is kidnapped, and the hero must complete a difficult quest to save them, even though it involves being pulled back into a life they have sought to leave behind. The particular family dynamics here lend a certain original flavour to this outline, though the overall project never strays too far from the established rules of the action-crime genre. The settings are mostly pretty rote within the context of British gangland fodder, though a little spice is added by a side quest to some manner of elaborate BDSM-flavored brothel/club run by a sultry rival named Cia (Mathilde Warnier), at the point in the narrative where we might normally expect to find a sleazy lapdancing bar.
The dangerous East London estate where all this supposedly goes down, though convincingly imagined, is very much fictional. There are no areas of London that are home to quite that much derelict real estate, after all — in actuality, this kind of territory would soon be rampant with pop-up food trucks and redevelopment. There are shades of “The Warriors” in the street gang that makes the area a no-go for police, while the more traditional gang leaders played by Alice Krige and Charles Dance are closer to British gangster heritage archetypes. Dance in particular earns his “and” status in the credits, with a characteristically sinister and patrician performance given in perhaps half a day of filming in a single location. Still, it’s always nice to see him.
Mention must also be made of Tom Bennett, who is good value in a broad secondary role as a beleaguered acquaintance with whom the gang temporarily hunker down around a third of the way into proceedings. Whether stealing the show as a ninny par excellence (opposite Beckinsale, as it happens) in Whit Stillman’s Jane Austen adaptation “Love & Friendship,” or having a wobbly time riding dragons in HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” Bennett is always supremely watchable, deserving of character parts in higher-profile film projects. (Something in the “Knives Out” franchise, perhaps?) Here, he manages to invest even throwaway lines (“If that was an option, why didn’t you do that half hour ago?”) with comic magic.
For audiences in the mood for a Guy Ritchie movie, but who have somehow exhausted the prolific director’s back catalogue (or are perhaps inconveniently subscribed to the wrong streaming platform), “Wildcat” should scratch the itch. Whether it’s worth watching in theaters is a different question, and one that won’t need to be answered in many territories. The natural habitat for these kinds of production values is home viewing, where the ripe dialogue can do the heavy lifting and the low-rent CGI explosions don’t have to stand up to big-screen scrutiny.
variety.com
#Kate #Beckinsale #Spirited #Gangland #Thriller
