Shadow Force is the kind of generic name that you’d usually use as a descriptor or a placeholder, i.e. “our heroes are on the run from a shadowy force.” In the spring of 2025, however, it’s the title of a rather generic action movie from the director of The Grey that’s about as shoddily assembled and nondescript as they come. Even the poster art looks like something you’d scroll by on Prime Video rather than a movie currently in theaters.
Omar Sy and Kerry Washington star as Isaac and Kyrah, a couple on the run. Or, at least, half on the run. He’s introduced watching over their young son Ky (Jahleel Kamara); she’s first seen sniping a guy who appears to be in the midst of a raid by some soldier-looking guys. (Like so much of this confounding movie, it’s unclear). They used to be a part of the titular Force, a worldwide organization that, as villain Mark Strong describes, was responsible for taking out the “dirty laundry” – though who’s dirty laundry and what that entails is glossed over.
A lot of the backstory feels that way: how Sy and Washington fell in love, why exactly they had to go on the run, even who their combatants are. It takes a good long while to even figure out why the action keeps cutting back to Method Man and Da’Vine Joy Randolph – though the latter is so much better than she needs to be that you wish she was the star of Shadow Force. We see Randolph in contact with Washington, but the movie declines to show us anything about her and Meth’s relationships or even who they are.
The most egregious example of this vagueness comes with the Shadow Force itself: They’re introduced in a “putting the team together” montage and a dinner scene with a “funny” story, but none of their names are ever even spoken aloud. At times it feels as if the script – co-written by Carnahan and Leon Chills – has been hacked to bits. A third-act reversal comes basically out of nowhere, featuring a couple of guys we’ve seen before but whose function in the story is as wispy as the fog Isaac and Kyrah drive through. It comes to the point where it’s difficult to even care about anything happening onscreen, and by the time we get to an incoherently edited climax, the most I could muster up was “Sure, what the hell.” Sy and Washington don’t really have much chemistry together, but neither is wholly bad in their action-hero roles. The same can’t be said for Kamara, who always sounds like he’s reading his lines instead of delivering them, and is usually stuck with unfunny sitcom-style jokes that don’t grate so much as exist.
In some scenes, Carnahan manages to get Shadow Force’s heart rate just a bit above resting. There’s not enough of them though, and one at the beginning has the inspired (if ineffective) choice of holding tight on Ky’s face as the image strobes to the sound of gunfire, the carnage unfolding around him only glimpsed later on a security-camera screen. Everything about the sets looks cheap and generic, while the cinematography lurches from actually being kind of compelling to “why movie look like that." It would be frustrating if there were anything to really feel frustrated about, but it’s also not haphazard enough to reach any level of “how did this get made?” Mostly, Shadow Force is just kinda boring, more like the idea of an action movie than an actual one. One can easily imagine falling asleep during it and waking up not missing a thing, the movie evaporating from your memory the minute you leave the theater. There just isn’t really anything there – you know, kind of like a shadow.
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