The realisation that Larry Yang’s 2025 action crime thriller The Shadow’s Edge was 142 minutes long caused both confusion and concern. The vast majority of action films rely on shorter running times, relying on their ability to excite an audience rather than tire them out, and focusing more on understaying their welcome than overstaying it. Asking for an audience to be thrilled consistently for 142 minutes is quite an ask, but for the most part, Larry Yang and his crew do manage to pull off this impressive feat.
This engrossing action thriller may have a familiar and cliched premise—retired surveillance expert, Wong (Jackie Chan) returns to the police help them track down a frighteningly skilled group of young criminals masterminded by one of Wong’s old enemies, Fu Longsheng (Tony Leung Ka-fai) also known as ‘the Shadow’—but in practice it is an exciting and enjoyable film.
Wong is tasked with putting together a surveillance team (after the police force has stopped funding them, prioritising the use of AI instead), and the film follows his efforts to track down the Shadow and the group of criminals he is puppeteering into stealing massive amounts of cryptocurrency. More specifically, the film focuses on Wong’s relationship with his niece and apprentice, He Quiguo (often referred to as Guoguo). Guoguo lost her father when very young, and she has an incredible desire to prove herself as an able police officer despite prejudice from her colleagues due to the fact that she is a woman. The relationship between Wong and Guoguo is given appropriate time to grow and become emotionally involving, adding depth to the script also written by Larry Yang.
What is most surprising, however, is the focus on the emotional side of the film’s villain. Utilising his background in arthouse cinema to deliver a complex performance, Leung Ka-fai turns this unpredictable character into a deeply intimidating figure, one that audiences will also feel for to a certain extent. One particularly good stretch of the film has Wong and Guoguo act as neighbours to the Shadow, allowing them to get close to him emotionally and allowing the audience to learn more about his character (while also having the constant underlying tension of having Wong and Guoguo attempt to stay undercover). These more melodramatic moments are terrific, bringing the audience further into the story while maintaining the same tension as its most thrilling action scenes.
The action scenes themselves are a different story. Sometimes they’re such high quality that they bring to mind The Raid 2 or even Oldboy’s unforgettable hallway fight sequence and yet at other times so poorly edited by Zhang Yibo that they are disorienting and terribly distracting. Yibo’s editing style is certainly at its best when it is less abrasive, but the majority of the film’s action is edited with a relentlessness that becomes more of a problem than a positive, hurling the audience recklessly from moment to moment. There are entire sequences in The Shadow’s Edge that feel almost ruined entirely by the editing; they feels more in line with social media videos than what you might expect from a high-budget film.
It is a shame that the film is held back by this glaring problem, because it is predominantly an excellent action film. The Shadow’s Edge does a lot right, anchored for the most part by its terrific trio of leading characters and performances, but there is no denying that the terrible editing causes the film problems. Otherwise, Larry Yang has created a very entertaining film in The Shadow’s Edge, with a lovely blend of action, crime, drama and a tiny dash of well-placed comedy, too.
The Shadow’s Edge is now available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Trinity CineAsia.
