The Shadow Strays

dir: Timo Tjahjanto

2024

The Shadow Strays maybe is a bit of a return to form, but I have to say, I’m still a bit disappointed.

When I saw The Night Comes For Us a bunch of years ago, I thought “I’ve just watched the most awesome, most violent action film I have ever watched in my life”, and it was true, at the time. What I thought it meant was that the same director would go on making incredibly choreographed, immaculately shot violent actioners that would make the John Wick flicks look like the dull and repetitive pieces of shit that they are.

But what I was doing was limiting and pigeonholing of this director, who clearly wants to make all sorts of flicks, not just hyperkinetic homages to the Hong Kong flicks of the 80s and 90s. He wants to make horror flicks, and comedies, and variations thereof. His flick after The Night Comes For Us was called The Big 4, and, yeah, it was nothing like his earlier masterpiece of carnage. It was disappointing, to say the least.

I think the technical, film criticism term is that it was “so fucking dumb”, and it felt 14 hours long. It took me a year to finish it, an entire year. I hated it so much I couldn’t even bring myself to write a negative review of it, and I live for such opportunities. It was a cartoon, and not in a good way, because none of it was animated.

Being the simpleton that I am, however, when I heard he had a new film out, my heart skipped a beat, my hopes flew sky high, and here we are now, entertain us.

It starts off promising enough. Lots of carnage. Perversely, there’s a whole bunch of ninja like stuff where someone ploughs through a bunch of yakuza, some with swords, some with guns; all are wheat before Death’s cruel scythe. Somehow things go wrong, kinda, and the main person who was chopping up crims willy-nilly is yelled at for stuffing things up by her boss.

It’s always hard to cope with honest, critical feedback from your supervisor, even when you work as an elite assassin that butchers people for a living. I think that the assassin called Thirteen (Aurora Ribero) could take constructive criticism if it were offered in a less combative manner, but then her line manager Umbra (Hana Malasan) drops her harsh words and is then ordered to fuck off over to Cambodia to do something shady by the organisation they both work for.

Thirteen is told to go back home, keep taking her red pills that either do something helpful or something terrible to her brain chemistry, and just wait. Wait! But this girl is not for waiting.

There is some ruckus next door in the Jakarta slum in which she lives. All that this is, is the excuse to have Thirteen start killing a whole bunch of bad people. It is not her dog being killed, or her vintage car being stolen, but it might as well be.

She doesn’t want to kill these people, but they are begging for it. This is where “plot” intrudes on my good time. My good time is watching Thirteen kick the shit out of bunches of people in well choreographed sequences. She really is very good. My good time is not listening to people explain why Thirteen killing so and so was bad, as she proceeds up the hierarchy of a very dumb organisation. I do not care that there was a guy who was a pimp and he was friends with another guy who is a corrupt cop and he’s friends with a guy who wears a gimp mask and he’s the son of a guy running to be the next governor of Jakarta.

I never need to hear anything about politics ever again, in my life.

There is a scene, I’m not making this up, where this guy is beating up Thirteen while yelling “Gubernatorial Candidate! Gubernatorial Candidate!”

And I don’t mean that he’s doing it in his language of Bahasa Indonesian – he’s squeaking it out in English while wearing a gimp mask.

Sure, you thought the flick would be in Indonesian, but there are long, painful stretches where people, for not much of a reason that I could discern, start speaking awkward and clichéd sentences in English to each other, and, honestly, they’re just there for the director to prove that he can direct scenes in English so he can get work in Hollywood.

And it’s paid off already. I think his next flick is going to be a sequel to Nobody, the Bob Odenkirk flick where he plays a guy bored with life in the suburbs who decides he just wants to kill people again in order to FEEL ALIVE!

But I can’t review that film yet – it hasn’t been made yet. I can only review this. So, in between the action scene at the beginning, an attack on a nightclub called Moonrose, and Thirteen’s various attempts to save a child called Monji, an attack on a side character’s grandma (it’s somehow less dumb than it sounds) and then a drug deal / final showdown, Final-Final Showdown and then Final-Final-Final Showdown, there is a lot of dead space. It is a bit of a wasteland. It consists of people talking, sometimes in English, not only about their hopes and dreams, and some of it could have been people reading sections out of an Adobe manual, I might have drifted off a bit.

These sequences are usually character building stuff, or backstory explanations, or witty digressions, or amusing whatevers in OTHER films. Here, it’s not even connective tissue tying together sequences – it’s just exhausting time wasting stuff that dulls the edge of the flick.

By the time we get to the fireworks factory – drug deal where Thirteen is coerced into killing some guy who previously wasn’t in the film and we have no feelings about either way, I really didn’t want to be watching this anymore, and the bonkers way that fight is resolved didn’t change my mind too much, and yet that’s only the aperitif to an impressive finale that goes hard, then beyond hard into extreme, and from there into the completely phenomenal. Thirteen ends up in a final, final, final brawl with her mentor / the only person alive that cares about her, and it’s as sharp and as brutal as anything else this phenomenal director of action has ever done, and it even manages to end on a powerfully emotional note, one of the few beats that work in the flick.

But that’s not enough for these jerks. There has to be a scene after that, that ends with an admittedly superb cameo, since it’s always great / terrifying to see Yahan Ruhian to turn up in anything, which promises / threatens another instalment.

This flick was already two and a half excruciating hours long, which leads me to suspect this was pared down from an even more unwieldy overall length, which probably had even more agonising scenes elaborating upon the shadowy organisation that the Shadows belong to, or why Umbra, Thirteen’s mentor, was killing Shadows in Cambodia (where it would probably would have been nicer to just allow those people to enjoy their Holiday in Cambodia, where people dress in black).

But Thirteen didn’t care, and I can’t imagine the audience that could have cared, especially whenever everything would grind to a halt when these Indonesian actors would carefully pick their way through English-American dialogue that sounded like grunted variations on “But you’re not following procedure! Have you secured The Package? Have you been talking your pills? Package secured” which is dialogue that not only could have been written by AI but acted by AI too.

That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here for carnage. And we get some. Maybe we get plenty.

But I compare this not to other people’s movies, but to the director’s own movies, and this fell a little bit short to me, at least after creating a new benchmark with The Night Comes for Us. I will always expect amazing things from him, and I don’t think that’s asking too much. He and his collaborators have found original ways to shoot the absolute shit out of action scenes in new ways with novel camerawork, and other directors will be ripping him off for decades to come.

And maybe I’m just being a fussy bitch… It’s probably one of the best action flicks I’ve seen since the Vietnamese actioner Furies last year, way better than Boy Kills World, but possibly a notch below Monkey Man, which was a bit more accomplished in the non-killing people scenes. Still, that’s good company.

6 times I don’t know if Aurora Ribero needs her own series of movies, but she certainly should be in all the action movies out of 10

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“Gubernatorial Candidate! Gubernatorial Candidate!” – I heard you the first time - The Shadow Strays