wanted to like it, but couldn't

“The Shadow” is cut from the same cloth as “Batman”, “Dick Tracy” and even “The Rocketeer”, yet compare it to those films and there is a distinct lack of personality to it. Sure, there is some enjoyment to be had with it and Alec Baldwin cuts a winning hero but there is much that seems missing from it, primarily a reason to care.


The film opens in Tibet, where a prologue so fast-moving and incoherent takes place wherein Alec Baldwin plays a Chinese warlord (yup, that’s right) named Ying Ko, taken captive and made to do battle with a flying dagger whose hilt has a constantly laughing golden head. We’re never sure why but Ko is a bad man in need of redemption and so he is taken in by an ancient who offers him redemption. The next time we see him, he is Lamont Cranston, a 1920’s American-James Bond-like-playboy in New York who moonlights as a hero in black trenchcoat and fedora, his face hidden behind a red scarf, called the Shadow.


As his voice echoes over a foggy night on a New York city bridge, striking fear in the hearts of men doing evil on that very bridge, it’s easy to see the Batman comparison but also the appeal of the character. He’s mystery and unsettling menace, made all the more chilling by a fiendish cackle as he toys with the city’s seedy underbelly. He also has powers of telepathy, invisibility, and ability to cloud men’s minds. If only it didn’t clearly look like Baldwin’s nose and jowls were being altered with prosthetics or silly putty (he somehow morphs into his brother Daniel every time he’s the Shadow), this would look pretty awesome.


And it only goes down from here. John Lone plays Shiwan Kahn, a character bent on continuing where Ghengis left off to conquer the world. He has a lot of the same powers as the Shadow, which means they’ll be meeting up a lot for tete-a-tetes and battles. This set-up reminds a bit of the mano-a-mano battle in “Highlander”, which was also directed by Russell Mulcahy. Here, his film has a brilliant looking 1920’s-Art Deco New York production design, he gets to play with light and shadow in many playful ways, and Kahn’s sorcery contains several eye-popping moments. But the story isn’t of any interest and even if it is just here to hang action sequences on..where are those action sequences? The film has one suspenseful bit inside a water tank and the ending does ok but Mulcahy seems to struggle to find much of a wow factor within his 1920’s pastiche and the film seems to cry out for something like the breakneck pace Spielberg brought to the Indiana Jones franchise.


It’s funny that the more suspenseful segments seem to come between Baldwin and Penelope Ann Miller’s Margo Lane, a seductress with a power of her own to read minds. Cranston trying to keep her at arms length and out of his head presents the two characters with some of the movie’s best dialogue but too bad that also can’t translate to some better romantic tension.


She fares better than everyone else though. Lone, for such a campy character, ironically just looks bored and out of his depth here. The film comes loaded with comic relief, from Peter Boyle, Jonathan Winters, Tim Curry, and Ian McKellan yet they all have so little to do otherwise that their appearances pretty much guarantee there’s not enough funny material to go around. And with a scene like Baldwin and Lone interrupting the evil plan portion of their talk to admire each other’s ties and ask where they got it, the film threatens to go full-on goofy comedy when it should be trying to maintain some semblance of dark mystery.


It’s an odd choice in a movie that’s far too bland and not nearly exciting enough to justify itself, which is a shame because Baldwin’s mix of handsome and intense line-reading, and the glorious production design are enough to get the movie half-way there. Just ask Tim Burton’s “Batman”, which coasted mostly on characters and visuals. But instead, this just feels like a low tier knock-off, a shadow of better films of that decade.