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Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Widows (2018)

This movie is not like most heist movies. The emotional currents that power this movie by director Steve McQueen (of Twelve Years a Slave fame) brilliant genre exercise are different—it’s societal inequity, exhaustion at corruption, and outright anger at a bullshit system that steals from the poor to give to the rich.  The story revolves around bad guys who hold people up and are not afraid to use their guns, corrupt politicians who barter with them to get what they want, and the women who are involved with them, who are somewhere on the spectrum between the bad guys and people who just work for their money.  The bad guys have a heist that goes south, and the women are being held accountable for the money they lost--so they pull off the job themselves, and in the process lose a bit more of their moral compasses.  It is a mix of shoot 'em up and chess playing scenes of calculation.
This movie is the kind that works on multiple levels simultaneously—as pure pulp entertainment but also as a commentary on how often it feels like we have to take what we are owed or risk never getting it at all.

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