Widows (2018) * *

Directed by:  Steve McQueen

Starring:  Viola Davis, Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, Liam Neeson, Robert Duvall, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Carrie Coon, Jacki Weaver, Lukas Haas, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Jon Bernthal, Garret Dillahunt

Despite its good intentions and wanting to be About Something Important, Widows has enough characters and plots to fill three movies, while not giving us any reason to care about this one.    Characters are introduced and then shuffled off screen for such long periods we forget why they are in the movie when they reappear.    Viola Davis plays Veronica, one of the widows of the title, who is overly hardened in some scenes, while an emotional mess in others.    She has the most screen time, but in a movie set up for us to sympathize with her plight, we find we don't care as much as we should.    This is nearly fatal to Widows, which becomes so congested and crowded it requires a traffic cop to keep things moving.

The first shot of Widows is a lovey-dovey moment between Harry (Neeson) and Veronica, a married couple whose careers couldn't be more distinct.    Harry is a criminal, while Veronica is said to be the head of the "teacher's union", although there is not one scene in the movie in which she is seen working at any office.    They appear to be in love, or in rampant lust, before Harry leads a heist which goes horribly wrong and results in the deaths of he and his crew.    The heist went askew because Harry attempted to steal the money he was robbing for a local drug lord Jamal Manning (Henry), who wanted to use the money to fund his election campaign to run for Chicago ward alderman against connected career politician Jack Mulligan (Farrell).

Fresh from her husband's funeral, Jamal shows up at Veronica's apartment demanding she pay back the $2 million her late husband stole from him.    It's of no consequence to Jamal that Veronica knew little or anything about her husband's job; she has thirty days to pay him back or else.    The "else" is in the form of Jamal's menacing, violent brother (Kaluuya), who is usually itching to hurt or kill someone.    With very little money or means, the desperate Veronica discovers a secret notebook Harry kept detailing his next job, which would net $5 million.    Veronica enlists the help of Linda (Rodriguez) and Alice (Debicki), widows of two of Harry's deceased crew members to pull off the job, and soon Belle (Erivo), a babysitting acquaintance of Linda's who is hired on as the getaway driver.

Veronica, Linda, and Alice are not the group from Ocean's 8 and to the movie's credit, they are never made out to be a cohesive unit.    They are amateurs, and they behave like it, although I am still at a loss to explain how they were able to muster up a second getaway car in the end.    But, Widows isn't merely content to deal with just Veronica's plight.    Linda, Belle, and Alice all have their own sad stories to be told, as well as Jack Mulligan, who would like nothing more than to lose the election and get out of the political business.    Because Widows has to juggle all of these characters and subplots, we never get involved enough about any of them to care.    And yes, there is a twist thrown in which, after the initial good-natured "you got me" moment subsides, doesn't make a lot of sense and isn't adequately explained.     Why did the person take such an enormous risk to deceive everyone else?    Even after the explanation, I am left with more questions than answers.

So what we have is a caper movie with some politics and violence mixed in, but it doesn't know what it wants to be.    It's all over the map.    It wants to be all things to all people, and winds up being not much more than a bloated movie with wasted potential.