Wildcat Review: Kate Beckinsale Anchors James Nunn’s Familiar But Competently Made Guy Ritchie-Style Action Thriller
Wildcat marks the second time this year for Kate Beckinsale to endure another kidnapping plot after Stolen Girl two months ago; this time, a deaf little daughter played by Isabelle Moxley. As for Beckinsale, she plays Ada, whom we first met in the middle of a gang war in East London. The movie doesn’t waste time focusing on Ada and her team staging a heist to rob the diamonds belonging to the mob boss, Mrs Vine (Alice Krige).
Ada’s team in question includes her ex-lover, Roman (Lewis Tan) and their friend, Curtis (Bailey Patrick), along with her younger brother, Edward (Rasmus Hardiker). The reason for their stealing the diamonds? It’s not because they are out to settle a big score, but rather due to Edward in hot water revolving around Mahoney (Charles Dance), a mobster who happens to be Mrs Vine’s rival. The fact that Edward causes so much trouble it ends up with Ada’s daughter being abducted, forcing her to reunite with Roman and Curtis to commit the aforementioned heist.
James Nunn, best known for directing Scott Adkins in the One Shot duology, tries to copy the Guy Ritchie-like gangland genre to hit-or-miss results, complete with profanity-laden pitch-black quirky humour and eccentric characters. The latter is especially true with Rasmus Hardiker’s Edward, whose gleefully unhinged PTSD-inflicted personality stemmed from his childhood trauma as revealed in a few bits and pieces of flashbacks, partly appearing as comic relief. The story also employs plenty of time-jump narratives with big words like “10 Years Before the Heist” embedded on the screen to take us back to all the hows and whys that lead to the diamond heist.
If you are familiar with this type of heist movie, Guy Ritchie or not, you know the plan won’t go smoothly as planned, especially after the story decides to split these characters with their respective side quests. One of which includes Ada visiting her former boss, Cia (a come-hither Mathilde Warnier), who operates a BDSM-like sex club, leading to a significant stretch of kinky foreplay and hand-to-hand combat. Speaking of the latter, fans of Kate Beckinsale’s action movies can look forward to seeing her in a full action mode, from gunfights to martial arts, despite having to put up with an obvious stunt double during some of her more elaborate moves.
The action choreography is neither spectacular nor particularly memorable, just enough kinetic visual distraction to satisfy the genre fans. It also helps that Nunn doesn’t frame the action in a jittery, agitated camerawork, which often made it hard to decipher what’s going on the screen, but instead favours a crisp and steady approach. This gives a sense of coherence to the overall movements of the action scenes. Enlisting Lewis Tan, no stranger to action roles from the Mortal Kombat reboot to TV’s Cobra Kai, is a plus. And here, we get to see him involved in some competently staged fight set pieces against a few assailants, notably a scene in which his character uses various tools as makeshift weapons.
The movie tries to inject a romance subplot between Ada and Roman as part of a backstory, even though it’s pretty much a filler added to the garden-variety storytelling. As for the rest of the cast, the otherwise limited appearances of Alice Krige and Charles Dance do their best to deliver quite an impression as two rival, no-nonsense mobsters. Wildcat may feel like one of those copious B-movie styles relying on a familiar name star, in this case, Kate Beckinsale, but at least Nunn gets the job done fairly well, while justifying the movie’s nearly 100-minute runtime with adequate moving parts.
