3+1 Short Paragraphs: Shadow in the Cloud

2020, Roseanne Liang (My Wedding and Other Secrets) -- download

I saw the trailer for this and thought, "OMG I have to see this!" with its Twilight Zone-ish premise of a secret agent type making her way onto a WW II plane full of men who don't want her there, bat-faced gremlins (vampires in the skies?) and gonzo survival action sequences (hanging off the bottom of a plane during combat) where an extremely capable girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) saves the day. Oh, it looked crazy, but my kind of crazy. I also saw that Max Landis had written the movie, and I knew I would like it, as he wrote one of my top ten TV series of all time - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

Maude (Moretz, The Equalizer) sneaks onboard a WWII B17 in Auckland, New Zealand (it bears stating that this is a NZ movie) with a peculiar case. Immediately after getting caught she presents orders from a base commander telling of her top secret mission, and despite all of their misogynist arguments against it, Captain Reeves lets her stay, but has her locked in the belly turret, where she gets to overhear some of the nastiest conversation between the men, and what they want to do with her. They are not happy a woman is onboard. Not long after takeoff, she sees a gremlin on the wing (shadows of Willam Shatner?) and shoots down a Japanese spotter plane, sealing the fact of her skills and capability. Alas, once they decide to let her out, the gremlin has done its work, and she is trapped down under when the shit (Japanese Zeroes) hits the fan (propellers?).

*spoilers*

I have serious reservations about liking this movie. Max Landis revealed himself to be a nasty misogynist piece of work in recent years, which probably made that eavesdropping dialogue rather easy for him. But here he was making a fun, gonzo action flick with a VERY capable female lead. But then the premise was turned on its head -- Maude is revealed NOT as a super-spy on a secret mission, but just as a single mother desperate to get her newborn baby away from a place she was not wanted. While you could argue that Landis was just saying that even "average" women will perform great feats of heroism to save their children, I more thought it of it as him not seeing a woman capable of being a super-spy, and the only motivation he could see for a woman being so heroic was to save her baby. At first, I thought, "producer meddling", and then I remembered what the Internet has been saying about Landis. I don't like to condemn on the words of the Internet, but the evidence seems... evident - the guy's scum.

Still, its a great fun romp of a movie, shot during COVID restrictions, and very apparent. A lot of the movie takes place while the characters are separated, with Moretz only ever being in the forefront. And she is very very good as Maude Super-Spy crawling under the belly of the plane, making me squirm and twitch on the sofa, as my fear of heights got to me. The movie never really tries to be anything other than a Small Action Flick with an outrageous plot, but excels at it.