When Kate Beckinsale donned the fangs for Underworld, she cemented herself as a bonafide action star. Alas after that series she hasn’t found too many vehicles in the genre that have really delivered the same magic. Now she is teaming up with One Shot director James Nunn for Wildcat co-starring Lewis Tan, Charles Dance, Tom Bennett, Alice Krige, Edmund Kingsley, and Matt Willis. Could this be the one that brings her back to action glory or will it fail to hit its target?

 

Wildcat follows ex Special Forces operative Ada Williams who is forced to lean on every skill she has to save her daughter when her brother Edward’s dodgy dealing gets her kidnapped. Pulling her old team together for one last job, they have to race against time, and a city descending into chaos, before it’s too late and Charlotte is lost to a murky underworld.

 

While I haven’t been that big of a fan of the last few movies from Beckinsale, my fandom of all things Lewis Tan had me eager to see what this one could deliver. The film suffers from falling into a more generic actioner than anything that is pushing the boundaries in action. The story is all over the place with so many different elements that it gets bogged down on itself and never really resolves everything in a manner that made it feel it had any real purpose other than to set up another action scene.

 

In the right more letting the action lead the narrative can work great, but here it doesn’t mesh well enough to make you care There is plenty of action here and while most of it isn’t anything you haven’t seen before it is always great fun watching Lewis Tan kick ass. The film is pushing Beckinsale as the lead, but Tan is front and center as well with all the best fight sequences that you can tell is clearly him bringing his usual skills to amp things up.

 

I wanted to love this film, but in the end, I just felt indifferent to the whole thing