Hit-and-miss action director Joe Carnahan resumes the punchy-shooty-explodey with Shadow Force (now on Starz), a generic timewaster with a Donald Trump-ass title and two likeable stars – Omar Sy and Kerry Washington – who I hope were paid very well for slogging through this doodoo. Man, does Carnahan straddle the line between genre auteur and hack for hire. He helmed tense, atmospheric Liam Neeson dadpic The Grey and the entertaining Copshop; he also helmed pinheaded dreck like The A-Team and Smokin’ Aces. I’ve already tipped my hand about whether Shadow Force is Good Carnahan or Bad Carnahan, so at this point we’re left splicing hairs over whether it’s watchably lousy or just plain lousy.
The Gist: The Shadow Force is a top-secret cadre of CIA spies doing the blackest of black ops shit. OPS, OPS, always with the OPS in these movies. I’d like a little less OPS and a little more on the grid stuff. So many movies take place off the grid. Remember, the grid needs love too! Issac (Sy) and Kyrah (Washington) were kickass badass members of the Shadow Force until they broke the rules by falling in love and getting preggers. One of the other rules is, once you’re in the Shadow Force you don’t get out of the Shadow Force unless you die. Somehow, they escaped the Shadow Force – which I assume is almost as difficult as getting out of a cellphone contract early – and attempted to have a life off the off-grid portion of society, which isn’t necessarily on the grid, but probably involves fake identities and such. The twist is, Kyrah left Issac and Ky not because the love went away, but so the dudes can live a normal life while she lurks in the shadows, watching and protecting them, a life that’s off-off the grid and definitely not on the grid. The takeaway? There are many nuanced variations of grid life.
Everything’s fairly hunky-dory until Issac makes a decision so stupid, even Stimpson J. Cat would be like, that’s pretty stupid. He and Ky are at the bank when three machine-gun toting robbers bust in. One points his gun at the kid, and this is when Issac takes out his hearing aids (damage from being around too many explosions), and becomes his old OPS self. We experience the moment from little Ky’s eyes-shut-tight POV, so we hear scuffles and shouts and gunfire and even though we see very little, it’s quite clear that Issac is endangering everyone in the bank. Sure, Issac went all superhero on their asses and laid waste to the bad guys, but was he not worried about his boy catching a stray bullet? You know what they say – you need a license to go fishing, but you don’t need one to be a parent.
No surprise, then, when the surveillance footage goes public, which means Shadow Force honcho Jack Cinder (Mark Strong) knows where Issac is. All those off-grid OPS secrets must be kept intact, so Cinder must kill Issac. Which means putting a $50 million bounty on his head and siccing the current Shadow Forcers on him, who are too anonymous to mention in detail, but boy, do they have some cool hair and sunglasses and other accoutrements (note, this is pronounced uh-cooter-mints) to go with their all-black-all-the-time wardrobes, which makes it easy to get dressed every morning.
The plot also needlessly complicates itself by throwing in Auntie (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Unc (Method Man), who I think are allied with Kyrah, but mostly exist to exchange “witty” “banter.” Issac and Ky go off the grid to a safe house, where Kyrah turns up. She and Issac get into an MMA fight in the kitchen because it’s entertaining, not because it makes any damn sense, and it’s interrupted by little Ky walking into the room and saying something precocious, because that’s his job. That, and singing Lionel Richie songs, because they’re his dad’s favorite. Ky knows all the words. ALL OF THEM. Will this movie truly go all night long, get stuck on you and have us so thrilled we end up dancing on the ceiling? Hello! No spoilers!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Didn’t we see the more basic version of this plot in Back in Action and that one Mark Wahlberg movie? You know, The Family Plan? Movies about grid-hopping are in, baby.
Performance Worth Watching: Mark Strong is dependably enjoyable playing scenery-noshing bad guys in junk like this. It’s a living, I’m sure.
Memorable Dialogue: Little Ky knows all the words to his dad’s fave “bootie-booby” song, Brick House, so he busts out singing that one, too, teeing up an opportunity for some meta-humor:
Unc, WHO YOU MUST NOT FORGET IS PLAYED BY METHOD MAN: Hey, you like Wu-Tang Clan, little man?
Ky: Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothin’ to f— wit!
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Kids. Don’t they say the durnedest things? Especially before their parents strap them into a secure rumble seat in the trunk of a bulletproof muscle car, and after the car is shot up and blown up and goes into an end-over-end tumble and splashes into the drink, which everyone miraculously survives with, even more miraculously, nary a scratch. Walking away from that is very hard to do, mind you. How hard? So hard, it happens offscreen. Shadow Force is one of those movies that cuts away from the wreckage, then to our heroes safe but damp in a hidey hole, then to the bad guy kicking the gooey pus out of his minions for letting the heroes get away. It plays like a parody of an action movie in The Simpsons, but contrary to such an affectionate condemnation, is not much fun.
The movie finds Carnahan – co-writing with Leon Chills – indulging his worst excesses: “Elevated” dialogue, pointless explosions, even more pointless location-hopping (Colombia, Spain, Florida, Mexico, more), a plot that’s already too complicated 10 minutes into the movie, and characters characters everywhere characters. Some characters say quasi-witty things, others just pose and fill space on the screen, and most are of the cartoonish her speciality is knives variety. A car chase plays like Fury Road but with three vehicles, 300 fog machines and no real sense of tension or urgency; the climactic shootout finds all the main characters surviving gunshot wounds while lessers do not, and plays like it was edited with a melon baller.
Set aside the fragmented mess of a screenplay, and Shadow Force shows promise – Carnahan has some visual chops behind the camera, and Sy, Washington and Strong are more than capable of flexing their action cred to play larger-than-life buttkickers. But the writing is godawful – the twists are of the lame-tryhard variety, and Carnahan wedges in some meager sentimental family-is-everything thematic balogna – and the execution depressingly generic. Nobody’s inspired, nobody’s heart is in the project, nobody watching will give a damn what happens. Most of the time you’ll shake your head and mutter what is this half-assed Wick shit under your breath, when you’re not lamenting the rampant Lionel Richie blasphemy. Here’s hoping the singer bought a Batmobile or something with the royalties.
Our Call: What say you, say me? I say SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.