Shadow Force movie review: Mark Strong has spent a career at the movies playing slick bad guys in some form or another. Rarely has he been called upon to do more – including getting shot again and again, only to get up and do it one more time.
That’s only part of the miracle about his villainous turn as Jack Cinder. Rarely has anyone coveted a position at G7 so strongly – nor they might again. An ex-CIA chief still proud of his bag of dirty tricks, Cinder goes about correcting everyone who meets him that he is now the “general secretary” of G7.
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Apart from one meeting where he puts presumably the head of the United States in his place by calling him an armchair nobody, Cinder doesn’t have to put in much office time. Instead, in sharply tailored suits, swilling the choicest whiskeys, Cinder jets about from private mansions in Miami to private islands in Bogota.
Enough about him. For as much as Strong is hard to forget – in a bad way – Shadow Force is about Issac (Sy) and Kyrah (Washington). Once Cinder’s star recruits in the secretive grey unit he put together called Shadow Force, doing “God’s dirty work” no less, Issac and Kyrah did the unthinkable by falling in love and having a son. Cinder would have none of it, and hence Kyrah and Issac must remain apart and raise Ky (Kamara) in secrecy – till Cinder finds out, of course.
The storyline then is Issac, Kyrah and Ky (joined together by love and Lionel Richie) versus Cinder and the rest of his blood-thirsty Shadow Force bunch. The initial scenes between Ky and Issac are moving and promise a movie that would have been, if not interesting, at least not this run-of-the-mill. Sy, a charismatic French actor and the star of the OTT show Lupin, is gentle, mysterious and a pleasure to watch. The fact that he seamlessly slips into French while horsing about with the much-too-unruffled Ky doesn’t hurt.
In contrast, Washington brings all her pillowy-lipped, dewy-eyed, hangdog demeanour to Kyrah, not really the femme fatale she is going for – that bustier-and-heels look is a call for help. Her and Issac’s bickering is a pitiable shot at doing a Mrs and Mrs Smith, which clearly filmmaker Joe Carnaghan too realises, moving quickly away every time they get into friendly ribbing or bickering.
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Who is Randolph, an Oscar-winning actress, supposed to be playing, and why? There are no easy answers to that.
Shadow Force movie director: Joe Carnahan
Shadow Force movie cast: Kerry Washington, Omar Sy, Mark Strong, Jahleel Kamara, Da’Vine Joy Randolph
Shadow Force movie rating: 1.5 stars
