Wildcat has a badass Kate Beckinsale and her hastily assembled motley crew turning London into a bloody war zone after a ruthless betrayal. The breezy actioner ticks every Guy Ritchie box in an unabashed knockoff of his classic early hits à la Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. You get the requisite jewel heist, vicious gangsters galore, and an avalanche of ridiculous banter in wild settings. The spectacularly convoluted plot doesn’t really add up, but there’s no denying a fun factor remains constant throughout. The bullets, beatdowns, and nutty characters are good fun in mindless viewing.
Ada Williams (Beckinsale) narrates her sticky predicament as she saunters towards the heavily guarded entrance of a diamond merchant. London is currently under the iron grip of two gangsters: Mrs. Vine (Alice Krige) and Frasier Mahoney (Charles Dance) battle for the top spot while a group of street thugs, called the Mishkas, nip at their heels for supremacy. Ada cons her way inside before the rest of her team smashes through the roof wearing gas masks. They steal millions in diamonds, but Ada’s troubled younger brother Edward (Rasmus Hardiker) causes his usual problems.
A series of flashback scenes starts from 10 years prior to 10 days before the heist and reveals the whole story. Ada and a fellow soldier, Roman (Lewis Tan), were lovers. She wanted to start a family, but he couldn’t escape their job. A decade later, a retired Ada leads a quiet life with Charlotte (Isabelle Moxley), her deaf daughter. Their peace is shattered after Mahoney’s stooges break into her house with a bound Edward in tow. They kidnap Charlotte and give Ada a deadly ultimatum.
It turns out that Edward had been stealing from Mahoney and now owes him a small fortune. He’s absolutely useless, so Mahoney targets Ada to get his money back. A terrified Ada calls Roman and another old friend, Curtis (Bailey Patrick), for help. Where can they get a ton of cash fast to pay Charlotte’s ransom? Mrs. Vine’s illicit diamond business is a sure bet, but they’d better get away clean or unleash a bigger poop storm with Charlotte stuck in the middle.
Wildcat has twists and turns aplenty as the plan predictably goes awry. Screenwriter Dominic Burns (5lbs of Pressure, Madness in the Method) uses the emotionally disturbed Edward as a dark comic foil that instigates all of Ada’s woes. Other flashback sequences show Ada protecting Edward from their drunken father as children. She became a fierce fighter while he learned to always depend on her rescue whenever he inevitably screwed up. This is the driving theme of the film, with Edward causing disasters and having to be babysat like a bad toddler.
The Edward conundrum becomes hit-or-miss with long scenes that deviate from the primary arc, but are hilarious with their inane developments. Burns has Ada and Ronan running around trying to recover Charlotte while the Edward subplots go haywire due to his goofy shenanigans. A good chunk of the film’s hour and forty-minute runtime is dedicated to this chaos. It’s pretty much filler material after a certain point, but it admittedly gets big laughs. Director James Nunn (One Shot, Tower Block) realized the action barrage wasn’t enough and gave Edward a bigger part during the editing process to boost the film’s entertainment value.
To be clear, the action isn’t weak, but does suffer from a degree of rote execution. Ada and Roman are randomly attacked every so often by goons who just appear out of nowhere, but they’re easily defeated and never pose a real threat compared to the big baddies. Nunn and Burns want to show that London is overrun with criminality and that’s clearly understood in the first act, so there’s no reason to have unnecessary violence popping up like Whac-A-Mole. You’ll also need a willing suspension of disbelief in spades as the svelte Beckinsale pummels burly attackers with ease while her shredded cohorts aren’t nearly as capable.
Wildcat’s villains are rotten to the core, but we don’t see that much of them. Hollywood stalwarts Krige (Star Trek: First Contact) and Dance (Game of Thrones) have the nefarious chops in their fleeting introductions, and then vanish for most of the narrative until their expected climactic return. They probably had limited time on set, so Nunn couldn’t fill in the gaps where they logically should have been present. Instead, we have Edward’s bungling overload and hapless mince meat connecting the dots.
Wildcat can be easily dissected with a critical scalpel. Discerning audiences who demand reasoning and logic in their action will see flaws that the film never overcomes. That said, the good outweighs the bad if you’re willing to give the film a chance. There are enough mangled bodies and grisly guffaws to warrant a recommendation.
Wildcat is a production of Capstone Pictures, Tea Shop Productions, and Bad Films. It is currently available on demand, digitally, and in limited theatrical release from Aura Entertainment.
- Release Date
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November 25, 2025
- Runtime
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99 minutes
- Director
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James Nunn
- Writers
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Dominic Burns
- Producers
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James Harris, Mark Lane, Crawford Anderson-Dillon, Dominic Burns