Being a child of the ‘80s I have a certain fondness for no nonsense action heroes who deal in dodgy one-liners. It is for this reason that I enjoy the majority of Jason Statham’s films because he is one of the few actors still carrying the action hero torch. The problem is this type of performance isn’t really what Blitz needed. Instead what we end up with is a film with a very muddled tone as it flits between serious crime thriller and cartoony action movie.

It is a film that attempts, very crudely, to make a point about ‘Broken Britain’ and the sensationalist media but it constantly trips over itself. The buddy cop dynamic between Statham’s hardman and Paddy…

How weak is this sauce? It's less a movie than a 90 minute excuse for Jason Statham to play Jason Statham wearing that one Jason Statham expression that Jason Statham always wears. Except this time he isn't skating through an oil slick on bike pedals or hooking up jumper cables to his nips, beating ass like a pro.

Instead, Statham plays a vaguely Harry Callahan-like cop, scowling his way through a gritty, vaguely Dirty Harry-like cop drama as he hunts a vaguely Scorpio-like serial killer who is wasting cops throughout South London. The murders are graphic and brutal but there's no suspense to the cat-and-mouse chase to catch the cop-killing Blitz, especially when everyone seems to know who and where…

Blitz may very well be the most generic and unremarkable movie I've seen in a long time, despite the Stathe camping it up majorly. Absolutely nothing that is in Blitz hasn't been done before and often times much better and while I have no problem with that in itself I really wish they had experimented just a little bit in order to keep me from falling asleep.

I enjoyed the first third of it but after that it really goes downhill. It doesn't go low enough to be considered complete garbage, it's just so terribly mediocre and bland that I'm not entirely sure why it exists and how Paddy Considine got involved in it. That said I would still say…

Despite the plot being as blandly procedural as they come, basically The Bill with fangs, there's actually a reasonable amount to enjoy here.

The camera lingers just long enough on the actors, a pretty decent cast for something so benign, Gillen especially geared up and demented as the chief antagonist. Some interesting imagery at play too, the shot of Gillen released from prison and walking down to face reporters like a boxer coming down a tunnel to face his fans, perhaps the rough cut cop film is aiming at some casual social commentary there, perhaps even connecting a firm blow on the empty morality inherent within the media.

Clearly though the best thing about Blitz is the evergreen Jason Statham.…

Jason Statham movies do well at the box office, I assume. I mean, there are usually about two of them released a year, not even counting for Expendables flicks, right? So why did Blitz get dumped in direct-to-video purgatory in the states? It's certainly standard fare, even better than a good amount of his theatrical releases. It's mildly slower in pace, and more of a thriller than a full action blowout, but that still doesn't justify the treatment this movie received.

Could it be the film is too British? I suppose not enough of the wonderful English actors involved are recognizable to the average American audience, and Lionsgate may have been concerned that references to fries as "chips" and other…