This 90% RT Hit Just Launched on Netflix & Is Being Hailed as This Year's Best Action Film
Get ready for gallons of blood and plenty of violence.
Netflix has released a new film by Timo Tjahjanto, an Indonesian director known for his super-adrenaline action films The Night Comes for Us and The Big 4.
This time the movie titled The Shadow Strays is for the strong ones – two and a half hours of pure violence and action.
What Is The Shadow Strays About?
In a snow-covered forest in Japan, a group of Yakuza are protecting their boss from an assassination attempt. One of the bandits tells a story about mysterious killers called Shadows: they appear out of nowhere, spare no one and disappear, leaving behind a pile of corpses. The boss laughs, asks not to talk nonsense, but increases security anyway.
It is not hard to guess that in a few minutes there will be one less Yakuza clan in Japan. The assassins do indeed emerge from the darkness, deal with the criminals in the most brutal way, and even turn out to be women.
A less experienced assassin, codenamed 13, gets distracted for a second by a geisha accidentally killed during a fight and gets slightly wounded, disappointing her mentor. She sends the woman into hiding in Jakarta.
When local drug dealers kill the mother of a neighborhood boy, to whom 13 feels some kind of connection, and then kidnap him, the woman's patience runs out. After acquiring a gun, the young killer declares war on Indonesian crime.
The Shadow Strays Is a Story of Revenge
On the one hand, it is easy to predict the dissatisfaction of some viewers with the blatant plot conventions, especially 13's involvement in the fate of a boy she has only known for a few hours.
On the other hand, Tjahjanto himself is well aware of this gap, and seems to laugh at it when the villains are perplexed as to why 13 is chasing them in the first place. It is impossible to count how many movies have been released with the story of a killer with no past and no name, who risks his life to protect someone he barely knows.
The Shadow Strays Features Unparalleled Action
But Tjahjanto's action is second to none. John Wick-style high-speed gunplay segues seamlessly into full-contact brawling, using whatever means available, be it frying pans, a motorcycle helmet, or steel pipes.
The camera does incredible somersaults, jumping from first-person to panoramic views in a matter of seconds, capturing the most unsightly anatomical details of each of 13's skirmishes with the hapless criminals.