For a movie about the German blitz of London, there’s not a lot of blitzing in this blitz movie called Blitz. It’s more interested in two very narrow slices of a much bigger – but largely ignored – narrative. I wanted more… whether it was more war scenes, more human drama, or more history. The narrow focus left me unsatisfied.

Yes, it’s set during the bombing of London in WW2 and follows a mom and her son. She sends him off to the countryside where he’ll probably stumble into Narnia… but he escapes the train instead and heads back to find her. She works the factories building munitions for the war effort and generally surviving.

Saoirse Ronan plays the mom with a London accent while newcomer Elliott Heffernan plays the boy. She’s good as you might expect. The kid is good too but very reserved so it’s often hard to figure out what’s going on in his head (other than a series of bad decision to run away from everyone who tries to help him).

But they aren’t enough. They aren’t super interesting as characters other than the possibility they’ll have a moving reunion by the end. I wanted more from both OR a larger cast of characters with their own stories of how they survived the bombings.

The film introduces subplots and abandons them… such as the fight to open up the subway stations for civilians to hide in. That’s not something I’d ever heard before and I found it fascinating it was even a debate. The movie, however, does not find it interesting and abandons it abruptly.

We also descend into a tiresome Charles Dickens story when the kid falls in with some “oi guv’nor” level of hoodlums. I’m happy the script abandoned that plot quickly… but why even bother if there was no interest in exploring it?

There was one harrowing big special effects sequence plus a thrilling disaster movie sequence in the underground. And, like I said above, there’s the dangling assumption we’ll get a moving reunion by the end of the flick. So the film isn’t without some dramatic and thrilling moments… but I was mostly disengaged and uninterested in what the film focused on… when it focused on anything.

This movie has some merit but not enough. It’s occasionally opens up to some interesting storylines, but it doesn’t focus on them. The main characters are ok and certainly played by good actors, but they are just stand-ins for a bunch of half-formed storylines. The flick tries, but needed a better angle or more focus.

Score: 73