Wildcat

The Burden of the Hustle

I have a real affection for the craftspeople who keep the direct-to-market action machine running. Directors like James Nunn aren’t playing with Marvel budgets; they’re juggling thin schedules, older stars, and warehouses somewhere outside London. Nunn proved in the *One Shot* movies that he knows exactly how to snake a camera through chaos and make a fight feel alive. That’s what makes *Wildcat* a little maddening. It’s a perfectly serviceable 2025 British heist thriller, but it keeps burying Nunn’s best instincts under piles of gangland exposition.



The setup is pure Tuesday-night rental material. Kate Beckinsale plays Ada, a retired black-ops specialist forced back into the game when her idiot brother Edward (Rasmus Hardiker) lands in debt with the sort of criminals who solve cash-flow problems by kidnapping eight-year-old girls. Ada pulls together her old team—including ex-lover Roman, played by the chronically underused Lewis Tan—to steal diamonds from an East End syndicate and buy the child back. Dominic Burns’s script keeps trying to complicate the job by setting two rival crime bosses on a collision course.

That’s where the film starts fighting with itself. The dialogue keeps reaching for cheeky, Guy Ritchie-adjacent banter, as if everyone should be tossing off one-liners with a wink. But the plot revolves around child abduction and a family in open panic. You can feel the strain every time the movie tries to be breezy. It bends, then almost snaps.



The action is the real reason anybody is here, and there’s one parking-garage sequence halfway through that says everything about the movie’s strengths and weaknesses. Lewis Tan tears through a pack of goons using whatever happens to be nearby, and he’s terrific. He moves with that rare mix of grace and blunt-force awareness that makes you wonder, again, why no studio has handed him a franchise. Every hit looks desperate, which is exactly what the scene needs.

Then the focus shifts back to Beckinsale, and the seams show. The cutting goes hyperactive. Her face disappears behind a curtain of tactical hair. The stunt doubling starts to feel less like movie magic and more like a cover-up. It’s as if the film is embarrassed by its own physical limitations and hopes you won’t stare long enough to notice. Beckinsale’s raspy, detached cool works reasonably well when Ada is standing still with a gun. Once the choreography asks for more than attitude, the illusion frays.



There is, admittedly, a grubby kind of fun in watching British acting aristocracy slum it for a weekend. Alice Krige and Charles Dance drift in as rival crime bosses Christina Vine and Frasier Mahoney. Dance barely seems to move from his chair, yet he still dominates the frame with that patented look of aristocratic disgust. Krige does bored menace beautifully, dispatching underlings with a face that suggests mild inconvenience more than rage. They’re not really playing characters so much as expensive silhouettes, but the movie needs that weight.

I’m not convinced *Wildcat* becomes more than a bundle of half-working parts. Phil Wheat at Nerdly called it "a lean, hard-hitting slice of British action cinema," though the knotty gang-war plotting makes it feel a lot less lean than that to me. This is a movie that keeps trying to wriggle back toward the fistfights while its script drags it into explanations. Maybe that’s part of the B-movie charm. I just know I would have happily traded a few pages of debt logistics for another Lewis Tan fight.