Kerry Washington & Omar Sy in Action Misfire

Let’s face it: Family life and being members of an elite assassination squad just don’t mix.

It’s hopefully a problem to which few readers can relate, but it afflicts the central characters of Joe Carnahan’s new action film, which quietly snuck into theaters without advance screenings. Kerry Washington and Omar Sy play Kyrah and Issac, who used to be members of the titular organization until they made the mistake of falling in love and having a baby. They’ve since gone rogue, but in a modern manner: Issac stays home and cares for their young son Ky (Jahleel Kamara, adorable), while Kyrah remains in the field to eliminate the many assassins who’ve been assigned to kill them for their transgression. As Issac explains to his son, he and Kyrah used to be bad guys, doing “God’s dirty work” around the globe before they realized the error of their ways and became good guys.

If you can’t guess how the rest of Shadow Force plays out, you just haven’t seen enough direct-to-video movies.

Of course, the screenplay co-written by Carnahan (The Grey, Copshop) and Leon Chills does its best to inject some quirkiness into the mix. Issac is largely deaf without his hearing aids and he removes them prior to launching into action, apparently under the theory that his fighting senses will be heightened. Both parents and child are inordinately fond of the music of Lionel Richie, resulting in numerous needle drops (“Truly,” really?) and such cutesy moments as little Ky fully grasping the messaging of the song “Brick House.”

Issac’s efforts to stay under the radar with his son go awry when a bunch of masked, heavily armed bank robbers make an appearance just as he’s at the local branch with his son. (Don’t you hate when that happens?) Issac carefully removes his hearing aids, springs into action and dispatches the robbers, all of which is caught on video and goes viral. It naturally comes to the attention of Kyrah and Isaac’s old boss Jack Cinder (Mark Strong), who you instantly know is no good when he’s first shown doing laps in a pool at his beautiful waterfront home.

After Issac’s exposure to the world, Kyrah returns to team up with him to protect Ky, leading to not-so-amusing banter about which of them is the better shot. “We don’t want another Odessa,” Kyrah points out, leaving viewers to wonder just what the hell went on in Odessa, because it sounds more interesting than what’s going on here.

As Cinder and his team of assassins get closer to their prey, Kyrah and Issac take to the sort of globetrotting endemic to these sorts of thrillers, complete with more exotic place names identified onscreen than you’d find in a travel agent’s office. Among their pursuers are the cutely named “Auntie” (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, having fun) and “Unc” (Cliff “Method Man” Smith), who are secretly trying to protect them. (This represents Randolph’s first big-screen appearance since her Academy Award-winning turn in The Holdovers, which only adds further credence to the much-talked about “Oscar Curse” when it comes to supporting performers.)

It all leads to the inevitable ultra-violent confrontation, complete with loyalty reversals, betrayals and the sort of high-speed motorboat chase done much better in James Bond and Mission: Impossible films. You won’t be surprised to learn that before it’s all over, Issac has taken out those hearing aids yet again.

The charisma-endowed Washington and Sy do all they can to make the proceedings engrossing but even they are hard-pressed to make it interesting. Strong tries even harder, investing his villainous portrayal with the sort of intensity normally reserved for Greek tragedies (he recently starred in a London production of Oedipus opposite Lesley Manville). But he’s undone by the sort of ham-fisted writing in which the bad guy takes so much pleasure in explaining just how evil he is — complete with ironic asides and smackdowns to underlings — that he comes across more tiresome than fearsome. Much the same can be said of Shadow Force.