10 Smart Movies Which Are Secretly Dumb
1. Widows
This is sure to be a bit of a controversial take, and that's absolutely fine.
Steve McQueen is one of the greatest filmmakers working today, so the prospect of him helming a gritty crime thriller had absolute gangbusters potential.
And on the surface, Widows is a smart, intense piece of work - a dense, layered slice of neo-noir about a group of women who carry out a heist in order to clear the debts accrued by their recently dead husbands.
But underneath a plot that riffs about the cost women are forced to shoulder for the sins of men, is a film that eventually descends into a Lifetime-caliber farce.
The climactic plot twist, that Veronica Rawlings' (Viola Davis) husband Harry (Liam Neeson) faked his own death, is so much more thunderously silly than the film ever wants to admit.
It's the sort of tacked-on, convoluted twist you'd expect to see in a considerably dumber film, and marks the point at which this otherwise rigorous, well-conceived piece of work starts to fall apart.
It's still an entertaining flick, but much tougher to take seriously as a Smart Movie after Liam comes back from the dead.