Jesse Hassenger

Director Joe Carnahan’s limply made thriller about an estranged couple of elite operatives is a lazy grab bag of exhaustingly familiar cliches

Maybe the new action movie Shadow Force is just deserts for film fans who complain when seemingly surefire big-screen hits such as Another Simple Favor debut as streaming-only releases. Shadow Force has a premise almost comically adherent to the fixations of so many big-budget streaming movies: elite operatives Kyrah (Kerry Washington) and Isaac (Omar Sy) must fight for their lives and their family when they defy the rules of their, yes, shadowy employers by falling in love and having a child. It shares familiar components including charismatic stars, spy action, domestic strife and semi-slapstick violence with projects such as Back in Action (Netflix), Role Play (Prime Video) and Ghosted (Apple TV+), among others. With director Joe Carnahan, it even has a once edgy stylist who used to deal in gritty grain, blown-out color and quick-cut aesthetics, now following in the footsteps of fellow 2000s-era action directors such as McG and Antoine Fuqua by eliminating all traces of color from his work – another streaming trademark. Somehow, it is nonetheless premiering in movie theaters.

The actor was once one of the most commanding men in Hollywood – yet he has now teamed up with the president to help ruin the industry

It’s a plain-sight not-quite-twist that was sitting in front of us this whole time. Following Donald Trump’s selection of the hilariously cursed trio of Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight for a made-up ambassadorship to Hollywood back in January, it was revealed that the position may not be ceremonial after all; it was actually Voight himself who helped goad Trump into making that bizarre statement about placing a 100% tariff on foreign-made films.

By insisting tariffs on films at least partly produced outside the US, the president is trying to limit the important worldview of cinema

Add movies to the ever-expanding list of areas where Donald Trump has no expertise or even passing knowledge, but assumes problems can be solved through tariffs and maybe a little racism, as a treat. Citing a threat to “national security” from movies that aren’t shot in the United States, Trump announced that he would be enacting a 100% tariff on movies made anywhere else.

The late cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who died on set, shows herself to be the saving grace of an otherwise poorly acted and overly long mess

Let’s put this upfront: the cinematography by the late Halyna Hutchins is gorgeous. Hutchins died in a horrific accident on the set of the movie Rust, when a prop gun, improperly checked before it was given to star and producer Alec Baldwin, shot a real bullet – prompting the reasonable question of whether the movie itself should ever be finished and see the light of day. Regardless of the moral quandary, the movie is here, primarily showcasing how good Hutchins was at her job. The first few minutes of Rust quickly accumulates half a dozen gorgeous images in establishing shots, and remains great-looking throughout – visually worthy, at least, of moments that imitate famous shots from classics of the genre like The Searchers and the True Grit remake. (If Hutchins worked on about half of the movie, it seems to have been finished following her visual lead.)