Top-tier action and fantasy movies have huge budgets, big stars and, perhaps most importantly, massive marketing pushes.  Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Most producers do not have big budgets and can only afford one recognizable name or two, and they try to get by with what they can.  Sometimes that works and most times it results in films like this, or the handful of films Bruce Willis made before he retired.  Forgettable stories forgettably told.

James Nunn’s Wildcat starts with a fairly exciting jewel robbery in London.  Then it explains why the robbery had to take place in flashbacks and what happens afterward.  Most of it centers on Ada (Kate Beckinsale), pressured into the theft to rescue her younger brother (Rasmus Hardiker) from debts to gangsters, and which soon involve the kidnapping of her young daughter to ensure the debt is paid.  Ada’s old flame Rowan (Lewis Tan) joins the fight to save the girl, which soon involves mass rioting in London and a reckoning between the two most powerful crime bosses of the city.

To its credit the story tries to make its main characters palatable and interesting, an effort that is only partially successful.  Other, secondary, characters help in that regard, but most of them are killed off in spectacular fashion, because violent action is what really drives this story, not the characters.  Multiple times lithe Miss Beckinsale is called upon to dispatch seedy types who just want to get to know her better, gunfights erupt in the streets and the abandoned buildings that the filmmakers can destroy with glee, or ambushes take place where our protagonists somehow survive because only they can actually hit live targets.  It becomes rather tiresome when it isn’t ridiculous.

It used to be that movies were made about real people doing real things, even if they were boring, but at least those people had to interact with one another.  That era of community has evidently vanished for screenwriters.  Now people just want to take advantage of each other, beat each other up, shoot at each other and have some fun dodging the bullets.  All of that is here and at least some of it is intended to be comic.  As an executive producer of this project, Miss Beckinsale must take some of the blame for its inanity, as well as its repetitious profanity and high body count.  What a waste.  ☆ 1/2.  9 March 2026.