"Shadow in the Cloud" keeps upping the lunacy for 83 wildly fun minutes

Shadow in the Cloud (2021)

“Shadow in the Cloud” is incredibly, deliriously ridiculous, but wildly fun. It takes a filmmaker’s go-for-broke sensibilities to make a movie that keeps embracing and upping the lunacy for the rapt viewer’s amusement. Writer-director Roseanne Liang & co-writer Max Landis (2017’s “Bright”) take the simple premise of the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” episode from “The Twilight Zone” and jump off from there with a wacky wartime ride as long as one goes along with an anything-goes cartoon logic. With a kick-ass Chloë Grace Moretz punching sexism and an ugly gremlin in the face for her one-woman show, “Shadow in the Cloud” is a delightfully batty genre exercise.

Flight Captain Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz) hops aboard a B-17 bomber, “The Fool’s Errand,” with an all-male crew during World War II in 1943. She has her one arm in a sling and her other arm is wielding a top-secret package. Maude isn’t exactly welcomed by the crew because she is a woman, and while one of them stores the package-holding satchel, she is placed in the gun turret of the plane. Unbeknownst to the lewd, sexist men, Maude can hear all of them on the headset. Once she reports seeing something on the wing of the plane, no one believes her or takes her seriously. As it turns out, there is something on the wing, and Great Scott, it’s a gremlin! There are also Japanese fighters in the air with them.

Following a “keep the skies safe!” PSA about aircraft-sabotaging gremlins that’s animated like one of those Warner Bros. WWII propaganda cartoons, “Shadow in the Cloud” rips from the word go for almost all of its nonstop 83 minutes. We are solely with Maude in that cramped, glass-encased fighter bubble for the film’s first half. The men are heard more often than seen from Maude’s vantage point, like listening to a radio drama, however, director Roseanne Liang does introduce the off-screen voices cleverly like a visual roll-call even when Maude is in the turret. Liang admirably keeps things moving and keeps the contents of Maude’s confidential “package” a means to an end, for the most part. 

Chloë Grace Moretz seems to always be up for anything, and the same goes here for what she has to do physically and emotionally as Maude. Even if she might not be as bonkers as Tom Cruise when it comes to performing all of the stunts, Moretz still sells every beat (her ruse-like accent included) and carries the entire situation. The majority of the other characters (made up of Nick Robinson, Taylor John Smith, and Callan Mulvey, to name a few) are gremlins themselves: sexist and insufferable chauvinists who refer to Maude as a “broad,” a “dame,” and much more derogatory names, and that is indeed the point. In the end, Moretz’s Maude defeats that gremlin just as she squashes gender stereotypes (despite the ironic credit of screenwriter Max Landis).

“Shadow in the Cloud” remains a tight, hell-for-leather popcorn thriller that might get a little too preposterously chaotic for its own good. Then again, subtlety is overrated and not always a mandatory passenger. Once a bat-like gremlin is introduced, any insane physics-defying act that Maude can perform should be forgiven. If you want realism in your gremlin-on-board movie, maybe look elsewhere (but does it share a cinematic universe with 2018’s WWII zombie action mash-up “Overlord” or not? Need to know!). If you want a batshit-crazy B-movie, “Shadow in the Cloud” offers that heart-in-the-throat thrill of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire adventure, along with an awesomely propulsive, 1980s-style synth score by Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper. No audience member could accuse it of being boring.

Grade: B 

Vertical & Redbox Entertainment released “Shadow in the Cloud” (83 min.) in select theaters, on VOD & digital on January 1, 2020.