An unrepentant maximalist whose genre movies are defined by the mad gluttony of someone born to leave it all on screen, Indonesian filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto is nothing if not easy to root for. There’s something indivisibly pure and precious about a guy who doesn’t know the meaning of the words “too much;” whose horror stuff (especially the “Safe Haven” short he contributed to “V/H/S/2”) goes so far beyond the pale that it makes a delicious meal out of its own bad taste, and whose orgiastic action fare (“Headshot,” which Tjahjanto and Kimo Stamboel co-directed as The Mo Brothers) is so hyper-violent that it makes you wonder if it’s possible to run out of CGI blood.
Alas, that muchness — beautiful as it might be in theory — is also something of a double-edged sword, and Tjahjanto still isn’t precise enough to use it without disfiguring his own vision in the process. Which is to say that, like “The Night Comes for Us” before it, Tjahjanto’s latest and most ambitious symphony of stabbings is another exhausting monument to its own excess; a graceless orgy of death and dismemberment that’s easier to appreciate for its spirit than it is to enjoy for its execution(s). Tedious, numbing, and always falling just short of the hard-boiled cool that it’s too derivative to reach for itself, “The Shadow Strays” is the work of a filmmaker whose enthusiasm continues to outstrip his skill. And while that giddy imbalance has always been the basic lifeblood of genre cinema, the endless silhouette cast by Tjahjanto’s sprawling Netflix epic makes it easier than ever to lose sight of the fun we’re supposed to be having with it.
“The Shadow Strays” begins as only a movie so devoted to its “more is less” approach ever could: With both a wall of expository text and a cryptic quote (credited to Medusa) that adds nothing to the action that follows. The gist is that our cruel and unforgiving world has given rise to an ultra-secret clan of mercenaries who will kill anyone for the right price, regardless of morals. They’re known as Shadows, they wear all black tactical gear which is a bit too chunky to look as cool as it should, and they will fuck your shit all the way up without thinking twice.
Well, most of them will, anyway. It’s possible that the Shadow known as 13 (played by a blank but believably dangerous Angela Ribero) might be a bit too soft-hearted for the life of darkness that’s been assigned to her, as we see during the frenzied prologue in which she’s tasked with eliminating a very cartoonish Yakuza clan deep within the Sea of Trees. It’s all fun and games for the first little while; 13 decapitates heads so fast they whistle off their bodies, drags a henchman’s balls directly into the blade of a sword that’s sticking out of the ground, and makes sure to reacquaint us with Tjahjanto’s signature bit of high-speed slaughter (repeatedly stabbing someone in the chest at close range). But everything changes on a dime when 13 accidentally murders the geisha she was trying to save from being raped by the clan’s oyabun, a mistake that leaves our heroine so out of sorts that her soulless mentor (Hana Malasan as Umbra) has to pick up the pieces. “Our mission is never easy but never complex,” Umbra tells her shaken pupil during her post-fight performance report, the cold-hearted killer effectively describing every action movie that Tjahjanto has ever made.
Sidelined by her organization until she can prove that she doesn’t care about collateral damage (Shadows are given a strict regimen of pills to stifle their emotions), 13 is left to wait things out in a squalid Jakarta high-rise… where she immediately develops an emotional attachment to a teenage boy named Monji, who soon finds himself kidnapped by the same big-time local bad guys who murdered his drug-addicted mother. A little tenderness can be a dangerous thing to have in a world so tough, and it isn’t long before 13 — scarred by a childhood loss of her own — is bleeding a trail straight to the heart of the Indonesian underworld, much to the chagrin of her employer. The words “paid time off” truly mean nothing to some people.
That premise might seem to set up a rather straightforward movie, but Tjahjanto’s indulgent streak forbids him from taking the shortest path to his story’s logical conclusion (an approach befitting a movie that has no logic or conclusion). Similar to “The Night Comes for Us,” “The Shadow Strays” has a lot more plot than it needs and far too few reasons for us to care about any of it — don’t sweat the details, but it hinges on the overlap between an upcoming election and several million dollars in stolen drugs. Preferring to emphasize color over clarity, Tjahjanto litters this vacuous chunk of pulp fiction with larger-than-life characters who are meant to create their own internal mythology, including Haga the pimp, his trigger-happy girlfriend Soriah, the crooked cop Prasetyo (“Posesif” star Adopati Dolken), a henchman with a heart of gold, and a large adult failson who likes to wear S&M gear while he tortures people for sport.
Not a single one of these human sketches comes anywhere close to elaborating on their archetype, which doesn’t stop Tjahjanto from treating their meshwork of internal conflicts with the seriousness of a Russian novel; “The Shadow Strays” doesn’t suffer from a lack of action, but the long and deeply uninvolving passages that surround them create a constant sense of restlessness all the same. That Tjahjanto interrupts the film’s lowest ebb with an extended detour about Umbra’s emerging conscience suggests a profound overestimation of the viewer’s involvement in this story, as do a variety of other scenes that only seem to exist so that “The Shadow Strays” can lay the groundwork for a potential franchise that its worldbuilding is currently in no position to support (the closing title card is immediately followed by one of the busier post-credits scenes you’ll ever see). And yet, for all of the stuff this movie hopes to sell you on, it almost completely overlooks what little emotional depth it seems to dredge up along the way. Intrigued by the patriarchal implications of a secret organization that strips women of their instincts and agency even as it turns them into unstoppable killing machines? Tjahjanto isn’t. At least not yet. Maybe in the sequel.
And so we’re left to wait for the fight scenes, which are frequently “awesome” but seldom exciting. Typical of the director’s work, the combat is too fast to meaningfully engage with the environment around it (which explains why the last hour’s worth of carnage is set in a series of empty spaces), the camera always feels like it’s a few crucial frames ahead or behind of where it should be for maximum impact, and the grappling style of Pencak silat has been suffused into the very fabric of compositions that tumble upside down and back to their feet again on a gimbal — which is never as satisfying to watch as it sounds on paper.
There’s no meaningful sense of escalation to the staging, and the performer’s skill and physical sacrifice is often diminished by geysers of digital blood, along with other CGI affectations that distract from the dynamism at hand. The beat where a bad guy’s face is shoved into the fakest-looking burner fire you’ve ever seen is typical of a film where the effort is rarely worth the reward, while a top-down shot elsewhere in the same sequence allows us to savor the raw technical aptitude that “The Shadow Strays” so often loses in its eagerness to be as sick as possible.
Of course, that eagerness is also Tjahjanto’s greatest strength, and where he succeeds is in the sheer brutality of his fight scenes. Much as my eyes glazed over during this film’s extended setpieces, their interminability isn’t without purpose. Tjahjanto puts his audience through such a bruising onslaught of violence that we can’t help but appreciate how beaten down and exhausted his characters must feel, a trick of attrition that allows their rawest feelings to bleed right through the screen. The intensity of 13’s emotions — her desperation to escape the moral oblivion of her organization — is so viscerally communicated by the combat scenes that it further obviates the need for all of the leaden filler that surrounds them. All that muchness, and nothing to show for it. Tjahjanto wants so desperately to make the most badass action movie you’ve ever seen, and that’s a beautiful goal to have. I suspect the rewards would speak for themselves if he simply set his sights on making a good one first.
Grade: C
“The Shadow Strays” premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It will be available to stream on Netflix starting Thursday, October 17.
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