The Shadow Strays

With the John Wick-ification of action movies, some tend to forget that the now popular grueling one-against-many action set pieces were the staple in Asian cinema and began years before the Babayaga with his pencil and his tactical suit took revenge for a puppy. Writer/Director Timo Tjahjanto hit the scene with horror shorts on The ABCs of Death, and without a doubt the best horror short ever in V/H/S 2 (segment Safe Haven) if you haven’t seen it, stop reading this right now and check it out. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

For the last decade Tjahjanto has been giving us film after film that blends intense action with a graphic gorefest that recalls the best and brutal moments of The Raid and the John Wick series. You can find several on Netflix now (The Big 4, Headshot, The Night Comes for Us) and all have that kinetic energy and blood-spatter-on-the-camera type gore. But with something like The Big 4 where Tjahjanto brought the funny, with his latest The Shadow Strays he leaves that behind and brings in the drama. But still keeps the heads flying off bodies with gallons of blood on the floor and on the camera.

Agent 13 (Aurora Ribero) is an assassin in a mysterious organization where they are known as Shadows. But being not that far removed from the age of 13 herself the young agent gets her job done but makes several mistakes in the process. Her mentor Umbra (Hana Malasan) is disappointed and grounds her in a rundown apartment complex til she is needed again. While impatiently waiting 13 befriends a young boy Monji (Ali Fikry) who loses his junkie mother to a local crime organization. When Monji is taken, 13 makes it her mission to do anything to get him back. This includes killing her way to the top of the crime food chain which may also bring the unwanted attention of her own organization of assassins.

The Shadow Strays shares a lot of its DNA with the afore mentioned John Wick flicks, as well as Luc Besson’s The Professional, and Marvel’s Black Widow. There is shadowy organizations, top-shelf assassins, a young person needing to be saved, and so many kicks and flips the camera has to flip itself just to keep up. That being said, Shadow Strays deserves to be in the same category of those films. Tjahjanto brings his brand of stylized violence to bloody realization on screen. You can feel the hits and gory pain as sharp objects are pulled out of body parts (and there are many). The action is brutal and our hero is in no way the perfect killing machine, as Ribero and her stunt team including Trisna Irawan, Haipei, Gilang Berliana Putra, Dandy Triandy, Roma Romberg bring 13 to epic life as she is bounces around a screen that can barely contain her. But what really sells it is Ribero in her quiet and silently observing moments that give you a deep look at her character.

Lets not forget the kung fu and gun fu that is beaten into us by legend stunt coordinator and fight choreographer Muhammad Irfan who got his start on the Raid films. It’s just as Liam Neeson shouted in Batman Begins: “This is not a dance!”, the fighting is not always fluid moments, is messy and hard-hitting and aggressively awesome.

I would say the only drawback of the film is it’s runtime at over 2 hours it feels the need for table setting for future films ala the MCU. Even if the coda at the end is a great set up for another film, peppering it throughout the film dragged it down a touch. It could have been tighter if the focus was solely on 13’s journey. But Tjahjanto has more to say and crams it all in amidst the hyper violence. If this is as promised the beginning of a series, then I am ready for more from this scrappy slicing Shadow.