Lacking the crackle and wit of the usually fairly mad Joe Carnahan movie, Shadow Force is full of charismatic performers angling for a moment in the sun. Which, for most of them never comes. Gunplay and banter are there, but they’re swamped by slack verbiage and scenes full of characters never properly introduced. So when the trademark Carnahan Big Finale arrives – guns blaze, wisecracks spark – ignition does not happen.
It should be good, with its mix of Kill Bill, John Wick and Mr and Mrs Smith plotting. Omar Sy and Kerry Washington play Issac Sarr (codename Sombra) and Kyrah Owens (codename Ombra), two members of a crack black-ops squad who, years before the story picks them up, fell in love and left the organisation – not allowed – to have a child. They’ve been on the run ever since. Sarr does the child-rearing while Owens keeps a shadowy watch over the man she loves and her only child, Ky (Jahleel Kamara), apartness providing extra security against the vengeful Jack Cinder, their old boss.
Meanwhile, in a bit of interwoven plotting familiar from Carnahan films like Smokin’ Aces and Narc, while Sarr and Owens try to stay one step ahead of Cinder and their old crew, another duo are trying to nail Cinder for his misdeeds. Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Cliff “Method Man” Smith play Auntie and Unc, bickering agents hoping to catch Cinder with his “hand in the cookie jar”, using Cinder’s Sarr/Owens fixation as a way to get to him.
So let’s meet the Shadow Force. They provide the film’s title, after all. Actually, let’s not. Krondon, Jénel Stevens-Thompson, Sala Baker, Natalia Reyes and Yoson An make up this bloc of bad-guy blandness. I might have left one off, they’re that hard to separate from the soft furnishings. Mark Strong does better, as Jack Cinder, the gone-bad guy. The charismatic Strong has played this role before and will doubtless play it again. He gets plenty of screen time and some of the film’s better lines.
Sy is best known to anglophone audiences as the star of the revived Lupin on Netflix. He’s French, something that is insisted on here. He speaks half of his dialogue in his native language, some of which is then translated back into English by Sy himself, some not. Whatever the reason for this – we get it, he’s French – it slows things down.
Weaving through it all is Lionel Ritchie’s back catalogue, a signifier of Sarr’s soft side, with Ritchie’s Truly a particular focus. Again, this is classic Carnahan – a touch of cheese to go with your bloodletting.
Carnahan’s usual MO is to take the standard action thriller and to overload it, piling on all the sauces and sprinkles while winking furiously at the audience, layering absurdity onto ridiculousness and then shooting it all with as much panache as can be mustered. There is little panache here though, barely any wit. Leaden dialogue, poorly sketched characters and chasms of sentimentality don’t help the dynamic either.
And when that Big Finale does eventually come, it’s not even shot that well. It’s either badly choreographed or badly filmed or possibly both.
Sy and and Washington, Randolph and Smith, Strong and the actors playing the Shadow Force, none of them come out of this well, which is particularly a shame in the case of Sy and Randolph, who both know how to turn it on.
Maybe Carnahan has gone soft. Maybe it was never really his project in the first place and he’s just journeymanning his way through this one – there was a different director initially attached. The last one, 2021’s Cop Shop, with Frank Grillo, was a cracker. Let’s see how his next one, The RIP, pans out. It throws Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in with Scott Adkins and Steven Yeun. Interesting star-status dynamics there.
As for Shadow Force, only Lionel Ritchie comes out of it OK.
Shadow Force – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
