Competing for the Cheval Noir Award at the Fantasia International Film Festival, Ricky Ko’s Out of the Shadow has all the right ingredients for a fun time at the movies: a coming-of-age tale for a teenaged protagonist who learns to trust herself through fighting, intricately staged and choreographed Karate battles, and religious symbolism that will guide the journey each protagonist will undertake in the picture.
Out of the Shadow starts out with a good concept but suffers in the execution
This film doesn’t start out strong and barely recovers. Opening with a stilted flashback that contains some of the most ridiculous wigs you’ve seen in a long time (one of them looks like he’s wearing the wig Tommy Wiseau donned in The Neighbors). However, it feels like part of the charm of a film that is shot and staged like a soap opera. Whether that was intentional or not is beside the point because those wigs are so hilarious that the sold-out crowd at the J.A. de Sève auditorium cackled with laughter every time a character was introduced with the most outlandish hairdo imaginable.
That’s not a great sign, but the actors seem to be self-aware of their demeanor, making earlier scenes of Out of the Shadow somewhat strangely compelling. The flashback sets up the main conflict of the movie, which we learn forced an undercover police officer to retire after the person she was supposed to protect killed herself. Many years have passed, and we get introduced to Chu Po (Larine Tang Yue-Ping), a young girl who wants to take matters into her own hands and exact revenge on the people who are harming innocent bystanders.
Yes, Chu Po wants to learn how to defend herself after stopping a bystander from taking inappropriate pictures of a woman without her consent while waiting in line. She enlists in a Karate school and quickly rises from a white to a black belt. As Chu Po learns the martial art, she also uses her newfound skill to beat criminals up. Why is that? The movie never explains it, but it sure shows us how good she is. Unlike Park Jin-pyo’s Brave Citizen, which had a reason for So to become a vigilante, Chu Po’s motivations are incredibly paper-thin. Overnight, she immediately becomes a vigilante figure that the town latches onto, and that’s that.
As a result, it’s hard to latch onto the story emotionally and the protagonist, since we have no idea why she decides to (suddenly) exact vigilante justice. It unnaturally happens, and we’re supposed to believe that the town she lives in has grown to need a vigilante as shadowy forces are filling their pockets with drug money. Speaking of, the crux of the plot occurs as a priest (Lawrence Cheng) is working under the shadow, unbeknownst to his son, by selling drugs smuggled in Bibles.
A mob boss (Michael Ning) is forcing him to do his bidding, which increases the tension between the two, as the priest’s son just got admitted to school in Italy. Chu Po eventually becomes involved in the whole thing, as inexplicable as the rest of the movie, which leads Out of the Shadow into its action-filled climax. The martial arts-inspired action is arguably the best part of the whole picture, with dynamic camera moves and kinetic choreography keeping us on edge. But they’re unfortunately sparse and happen only when absolutely necessary.
Cool martial arts action doesn’t redeem the flaws of Ricky Ko’s film
It doesn’t help that Ko frequently cuts away from the action, which never gives the audience the cathartic release they deserve as the suspense is progressively built up. Sure, the action flourishes are cool and seem to have been well-received, but the rest of the film leaves little to be desired. The character arcs we get are clichéd and thinly developed, and the further development of protagonists is mostly treated off-screen, where most of the emotional journey is found.
The villains also have little to no motivations other than making money. It’s fine if Ko wants to keep his story simple, but he has to make us give a damn about each character’s journey. Unfortunately, he’s never able to get us invested in his story, and arcs that are never further developed past the introductory stage. Even with a decent, and heartfelt, lead performance from Tang as Chu Po, the film still feels incomplete and lackadaisical.
In fact, the trailer for Lau Kar-leung’s Cat vs. Rat, which played before the movie, looked far more complete, intriguing, and exciting than the entirety of Out of the Shadow. If you show us something as cool and as incredible as that, then I expect the movie to be on the same level as Kar-leung’s film. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that it would not be at all in the same ballpark.
For more about Out of the Shadow at Fantasia Fest 2024, see Fantasia Festival’s website. Are you interested in seeing this movie? Or have you seen it? Let us know what you think on social media @mycosmiccircus!
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