Widows: Steve McQueen's all-female heist movie takes aim at the patriarchy, racism, dirty politics

Coming just months after the disappointing Oceans 8, Widows charges into theatres like the grittier, more political all-female heist movie the world needs right now.

Loosely based on the 1980s British TV series written by Lynda La Plante, it's about a trio of Chicago women who plan a heist to pay back money swiped by their dead criminal husbands.

On the surface it looks a much bolder package than Oceans, with an even more diverse cast headed by Viola Davis.

But in the hands of British director Steve McQueen, who co-wrote the script with Gone Girl and Sharp Objects screenwriter Gillian Flynn, it feels like it's stuck between a subpar episode of The Wire, complete with corrupt politicians and ghetto power plays, and an actual fun night at the movies.

Davis plays Veronica, a determined but understandably petrified woman who once turned a blind eye to what her husband (Liam Neeson) did for a living, and whose day job as a teachers union representative has done nothing to prepare her for the task at hand.

McQueen depicts her as a middle-class black woman in a white world with clumsy symbolism — her body draped by white bedsheets, or foregrounded against the bright surfaces in her minimalist apartment.

Lucky for her, hubby left her the plans for a heist he never completed, seemingly aware that one day he may no longer be around, and that she might need the money.

To execute the robbery, she joins forces with two other widows: Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), a Latina small business owner who sells gaudy pageant dresses, and Alice (Australian Elizabeth Debicki), a white trash character who shares her flat with her husband's motorcycle (her mother is like a villain from Real Housewives, played by fellow Australian Jacki Weaver).

Eventually, the trio enlist black hairdresser Belle (played by Cynthia Erivo) as their driver, which completes what is, by Hollywood standards, a conspicuously diverse group.

The intersections of race and class don't stop there.

The women have to pay back the money to a gang of vicious black thugs who seem even more dangerous than their husbands were. Their leader (Brian Tyree Henry) is a gangster who's trying to go straight by running for local office. His brother and enforcer (Daniel Kaluuya) is a terrifying villain, at one point torturing a man in a wheelchair with a knife.

Their brutality is terrible, but you do feel some empathy for them once you meet the white men who actually control politics in this area.

The incumbent local politician (Colin Farrell) is a slick, cynical legislator who lives in a gentrified corner of the neighbourhood and secretly despises his predominantly black constituency. His racist father, played by Robert Duvall, is the kind of curmudgeonly old coot who still uses the n-word.

Slice and dice this fresco of psychopaths any way you like, but the film's central thesis seems to be that men are all pretty bad, and the sisters need to start doing it for themselves.

Fair enough.

McQueen is aiming for big targets: the patriarchy, whiteness, political nepotism. He has always tackled big issues in his films, from Ireland's Troubles (Hunger) to sex addiction (Shame) and slavery (Academy Award-winner 12 Years a Slave).

Widows, however, is his most tonally complex film — one with a delicious twist — and he seems unable to reconcile his political critique with his job to entertain.

He shows no ear for the script's flashes of buddy movie banter, he can't sustain the tension, and despite directing a breathtaking opening sequence, his choreography of the heist itself is disappointingly bland, exacerbated by some generic percussive music that sounds like it was whipped up by Hans Zimmer's intern.

In his previous films, McQueen's background as a video artist shone through in images that were interesting conceptually. But here, this talent comes across only occasionally.

A long take captured by a camera on the bonnet of a car as it drives from a ghetto to a mansion just blocks away illustrates how economic extremes exist in close proximity, for example.

But it's a fairly obvious point, in a film brimming with obvious points.

By far McQueen's strongest card is Veronica and her grief. Davis is a magnetic actress who radiates powerful sorrow and fierce anger in this role. She's haunted by tender, intimate visions of her husband — part memory, part ghost.

Presumably this is where Flynn, a master of the dead girl trope, had her biggest input: substituting a guy for the girl.

Widows is strongest when it's the story of the hole Veronica's husband has left in her life, and how she must find the strength to carry on.

None of the other women's storylines are as well handled.

Even so, McQueen almost undoes his good work with a grandiose attempt to make a statement about US race relations on the back of Veronica's personal story.

He might have said less, but communicated more. Widows is cluttered and lumbering, with only occasional moments of transcendence. It's not the worst heist movie ever made, and it's better than Ocean's 8, but it commits a cardinal sin of the genre by being, all too frequently, dull.