‘The Shadow Strays’ (Streaming review)

Those who have been reading my reviews on this site for some time know my great affection for the work of Indonesian gore-king Timo Tjahjanto.

I previously reviewed his fun Mission: Impossible style romp The Big 4, and I don’t know how many reviews on contemporary Asian action films I’ve begun by mentioning that his hyper violent opus The Night Comes for Us is still the reigning, defending, undisputed champion for no holds barred action films anywhere in the world.

Netflix SEA releasing a new Timo Tjahjanto film is cause for celebration under any circumstances but doubly so today because The Shadow Strays, his latest picture, is a spiritual sequel to the aforementioned The Night Comes for Us that builds out on the shadowy organization that Julie Estelle’s “Operator” character worked for.

Unlike The Big 4, this film is definitely aiming to deliver the same kind of unreplicated mix of splatter and Silat that only Timo can conjure.

18 year old Aurora Ribero plays “13”, a rookie member of a worldwide assassination bureau called “The Shadows of Death.”

After an assignment to eliminate an entire Yakuza clan in one strike goes bad, her mentor Umbra (Hana Malasan) places her on suspension and grounds her in Jakarta. While cooling her heels, she befriends Monji (Ali Fikry), a young boy who has recently lost his mother to an overdose. When Monji ends up kidnapped by the local organized crime element, 13 blows her cover to take down the gangsters and earns a death sentence from her own organization.

The Shadow Strays begins with a Bond-esque pre-titles sequence of such glorious, stylish, sustained violence that anyone familiar with Tjahjanto’s work must sit up and take notice. As Ribero, decked out for all the world like a high tech ninja, mows down dozens of Yakuza heavies in a hailstorm of viscera, the fan mutters under their breath “He’s really going for it with this one.”

The choreography is otherworldly, the production values and photography a clear step up, I was preparing myself for a coronation.

It never quite arrived.

I want to make it clear before I continue that I love The Shadow Strays and I think it is worth buying a month of Netflix just to watch it and Timo’s other films in 4K. It isn’t a perfect movie, and I think someone less versed in this director’s work might be swept away by the film’s incredible action set pieces and not really give it the analysis it deserves. So, while I’m going to give it fair critique and I want to make it abundantly clear: if you love action or martial arts films, this is one of the best films of the last several years.

That said, the story of a specialized criminal assassin having a bout of conscience regarding a child and being hunted down by their employers is literally the exact same story as The Night Comes for Us.

Not “influenced by.”  Not an “homage to.” It is literal self-plagiarism.

Worse still, while that film couched its melees in fairly relatable themes of childhood friends at odds with one another due to a quirk of fate, this film chooses to concern itself with a clique of international assassins. Therefore it loses that basic psychological relatability: when Joe Taslim’s character unleashed holy hell on the bad guys in The Night Comes for Us you could feel his desperation to avoid the oncoming tragedy of fighting his friends. You could connect to the idea that he was trapped in a world that would allow him to be nothing but violent, and could never escape it.

Aurora Ribero is an amazing physical performer, but her character is entirely reactive and we never get that same feeling of a doomed person scrapping to avert tragedy, weary at the world. Instead her dynamic with Malasan plays more like teenage rebellion and robs the third act of much of its potency. Malasan, for her part, begins to embody the weariness of her trade as the film progresses but because we never get a sense of the depth of their bond in the good times, how can we grieve when we see it split apart by the conflicting desires of their heart?

Also, a note about the action: While it is certainly as gruesome at times as Headshot or The Night Comes for Us it feels more anime inspired this time around and less desperate. In those earlier films the pervasive violence felt like a mixture of Lucio Fulci and Jackie Chan– a desperate underdog clawing for whatever he could get his hands on and then turning the tables by grinding his foes to a bloody pulp. Here there’s a slickness to the violence that I think cushions its impact, which wouldn’t be as big of a deal if you weren’t really missing that melodramatic base that underpins the fights.

The result is a recommendation with reservations: this film is one of the most thrilling action films you will ever see but at 2 hours and 35 minutes it is flabby and its downtime is felt more palpably because of the unreality of its subject. The action set pieces are strong enough to carry the film, they’re stronger than any you’ll find in a contemporary action film, but this feels more like a cover of a song I already know and love rather than a new track.

Recommended. 

The Shadow Strays is currently streaming on Netflix.