Calling a Spade a Spade: Spades Movie Review

by Andie Salm Carver

Spades follows Detective James Bishop (Jason Narvy, former Power Rangers co-star) as he investigates a series of femicides and kidnappings. He wakes long before his 5 o’clock alarm each morning, haunted by his time in the military. The film opens with a flashback: Bishop deployed in the Middle East, likely during the War on Terrorism, with fellow soldiers; among them sits smiling, card-trick-wielding Jimmy, played by Johnny Yong Bosch, who also wrote and directed the movie. Jimmy dies in combat, but don’t worry: We’ll see him again. He becomes Bishop’s guardian angel—as if he didn’t have a closer loved one to protect, just the homie he made in the military and already died to save. Or: is he the Grim Reaper?!

The motif of “picking a card” preys on the movie, for seemingly no reason. Initially, a playing-card-as-calling-card helps our hero identify the work of his dead comrade, but after that, the cards serve no purpose. Spades, as zombie superhero, works with a gun, the weapon he was trained to use in life, not a shovel, or playing-card-shaped ninja stars or something. He paints a skull on his mask to drive home the Grim Reaper imagery, and his specific card deck was also embossed with a skull, but beyond that, there is no feasible connection.

The throughline of PTSD notwithstanding, Spades is a remarkable military advertisement—Bishop must kill people to protect his family to get over the trauma of killing people to protect his family—also resurrecting some major tropes from Ghost Rider and Taken. In Spades, we not only see the kidnapping of the main character’s daughter and human trafficking conducted by foreigners—because “real” Americans would never—but the film also features the dark web and scary masks. While the masks are unexpectedly effective at evoking discomfort, the dark web is nothing but a prop that the cops can’t understand, along with any other form of technology that isn’t a touchscreen smartphone. In one scene, Detective Bishop holds a decades-old MP3 player—with corded headphones and actual buttons—and proclaims, “These things get more and more confusing every year.”

With a budget of $50,000, Spades is an impressive proof of concept. Where the story stumbles over plotholes, the cinematography, editing, lighting, fighting choreography, and CGI effects shine through the shady spaces. Beyond military propaganda, we also catch car advertisements in the slow-motion drifts of the Dodge Charger, which becomes the movie’s own Hell Charger spotlighted with blue, wispy flames. Bosch loves his blue wispies as much as he loves giving his otherworldly characters dark irises and shining pupils: Both appear first in his four-year-old short film The Baku, also released by Vox Rocket Studio.

The sound design sparkles in spots where the intended tone is serious, but the few jokes smattered across the film fall flat behind the music or sound effects. It takes a moment to realize, “Oh, that was supposed to be funny.” Despite the fumbled delivery, a few physical comedy stunts managed to make me laugh: Bishop tries to convince the Grim Reaper not shoot the bad-guy woman, and the Grim Reaper sets his gun aside only to pull out a knife with the other hand in one smooth movement, much to our good guy’s chagrin.

Despite the surprisingly racially diverse cast, with some stereotypes subverted, the subtitles for our nondescript Asian mobsters are riddled with typos, including “Makes me want to taster her” and “deliverd tonight.” Hyde McKenzie (Loic Boucheny), righthand henchman, also cannot decide which accent to don for this role; Boucheny played around with different dialects long after Bosch yelled “Action!”

Furthermore, the women in this movie are almost completely useless without the guidance of men. Past the bound and sobbing extras, the female henchman, Tereza (Crystal Lee), and Bishop’s daughter, Lana (Maya Brattus), make up the entirety of the female characters—technically this movie does pass the Bechdel test—and they do some fighting of their own, but they would get blown to ground beef without the strong men in their lives, who protect them with their bulging biceps and unbreakable fists and, don’t forget, big, black guns.

There is a scene that bad-ass-ifies Lana and a fun plot twist at the end, but these inclusions beg more questions than answers. Now, if you are willing to set aside any queries you have about the plot—if you are open to being bedazzled by special effects and the bang-bangs of pew-pews—you can check this movie out for yourself by renting or buying it outright on Amazon Prime.