Maybe the new action movie Shadow Force is just deserts for film fans who complain when seemingly surefire big-screen hits such as Another Simple Favor debut as streaming-only releases. Shadow Force has a premise almost comically adherent to the fixations of so many big-budget streaming movies: elite operatives Kyrah (Kerry Washington) and Isaac (Omar Sy) must fight for their lives and their family when they defy the rules of their, yes, shadowy employers by falling in love and having a child. It shares familiar components including charismatic stars, spy action, domestic strife and semi-slapstick violence with projects such as Back in Action (Netflix), Role Play (Prime Video) and Ghosted (Apple TV+), among others. With director Joe Carnahan, it even has a once edgy stylist who used to deal in gritty grain, blown-out color and quick-cut aesthetics, now following in the footsteps of fellow 2000s-era action directors such as McG and Antoine Fuqua by eliminating all traces of color from his work – another streaming trademark. Somehow, it is nonetheless premiering in movie theaters.
This change of venue should be doing Shadow Force a great service. No action picture worth its salt will play better on a smaller screen. But blown up to theater size, Shadow Force doesn’t look any more epic or exciting. It’s working from such a greyish and muted color palette that when enemy combatants throw smoke bombs in order to conceal their attacks, you might find yourself thinking: what’s the difference, really? The whole movie looks like it’s waiting for smoke to clear.
The story is mired in murk, too. Though the most obvious reference points are the bad action movies available on every streaming service, the movie also rips off large chunks of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, without that movie’s heightened, alternate-reality style: Washington’s lady badass finds out she’s pregnant and eventually faces the wrath of her former co-workers. She’s even the ex-paramour of big boss Jack (Mark Strong). That’s just the backstory; the movie begins in earnest with Isaac, also in a hidden Shadow Force retirement, caring for his cute son Ky (Jahleel Kamara).
These early scenes between Sy and Kamara are sweetly played, but it’s never really clear what their day-to-day life entails. How does Isaac stay under the radar with his former employers? The movie’s big idea is that Isaac and Ky’s peaceful life has been enabled by Kyrah separating from her family, but both parents worked for an organization omniscient enough to almost immediately find Isaac via security-camera footage of him foiling a bank robbery. So if they are that powerful, what good would Kyrah do by staying away? Shadow Force has the kind of screenplay that manages to explicate endlessly while explaining very little.
Rather than proceeding quickly enough to render these questions irrelevant, the movie also has an odd habit of continually plopping the audience down into situations and subplots it seems to expect they will intuitively understand, like sequences featuring a couple of other Shadow Force agents played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Method Man. Many scenes start and stop without much sense, never gathering the kind of momentum that the movie’s shamelessly frequent child endangerment is supposed to provide. Instead, it primarily gives Washington, one of our more strenuous overactors, plenty of opportunity to revel in motherly anguish alongside her steely determination (which seems designed to compensate for the fact that action-wise, she doesn’t do a whole lot here). Sy fares a bit better in balancing a sense of warmth and toughness.
The movie also lingers on moments featuring Strong’s hair-trigger Jack, perhaps because he’s the only character who seems to realize he is in a Joe Carnahan movie. That’s the real disappointment of this movie’s disposability. Carnahan doesn’t always hit, but he recently seemed to be mounting a comeback with the underseen 2021 thriller Copshop, which has some elements in common with this one: a charismatic Black woman in the lead, a scenery-chewing tough guy from the UK as her antagonist. It is also one of his best, least smirky, most exciting films, a western-style standoff picture with plenty of strong characterization and dark humor. Now comes this drab exercise in parental righteousness that has to make up a whole secret agency to serve as the object of mirthless wrath. Though it’s positioned in the early days of the summer movie reason, Shadow Force winds up as an unintentional advertisement for staying home.
