'Jade' (2025) Movie Review

Shaina West should become the next badass DTV action star. She has charisma, style, and screen presence for days, and most importantly the—largely self-taught after a motorcycle accident—martial arts chops to handle the job. With small parts in The Woman King, Black Widow, and The Killer’s Game, let’s hope that the next starring vehicle she finds is a better movie than Jade. It’s further proof of something we’ve known for decades, just because you’ve seen a lot of Tarantino movies does not mean you can make your own Kill Bill.

 

 

The latest from veteran-stunt-performer-turned-director James Bamford (Man With No Past, Arrow) clearly has budget restrictions—though they did pony up to get Mickey Rourke and Mark Dacascos to show up—and the cast and crew do what they can with what they have. Because of this, there are issues that are easier to overlook in this type of lo-fi genre throwback homage—sometimes there’s just no way to get the shot you need to fill in a gap here or there. That happens. There are other problems, however, major ones, that can’t be so quickly glossed over. 

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Pacing is a huge problem and there’s little continuity scene to scene. In one instance, for example, the protagonist, Jade (West), runs for her life, bad guys hot on her heels, and she’s barely out of their grasp. She bursts out of a door. Then cut and she stops to have a minutes-long conversation with zero sense of urgency. Similarly, sequences are allowed to drag on and on, well after the film should cut away. As a result, the finished product is messy and jumbled and feels cobbled together from mismatched parts. 

 

Amidst an avalanche of largely inconsequential backstory—her parents were murdered when she was a child, she and her brother are shipped off to Albuquerque, they joined a gang to survive—the plot boils down to the fact that Jade randomly comes to possess a hard drive and different factions want it. For reasons. This includes criminal boss Tork (Rourke in a red mesh and lace shirt), her old gang leader, some corrupt maybe-cops, and an Interpol agent (Dacascos). The rest is convoluted window dressing. 

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For all the alluded-to history that supposedly drives our hero, it carries little weight. In the opening voice over, it’s mentioned that Jade accidentally killed her own brother, another fact that’s skipped right over, and vowed to never use a gun again. But halfway through she picks up a discarded pistol and starts blasting dudes with little to no apparent thought or feelings on the matter. The film tells us all of these things, all of this information, but we never see it have any consequence or impact, and thus the whole thing is empty and powerless. All we get are characters making not just dumb decisions, but nonsensical ones disconnected from the reality around them. 

 

Written by former Canadian news anchor and first-time screenwriter Lynn Colliar and her husband, Glenn Ennis, a stuntman whose only previous writing credit is the Verne Troyer horror vehicle Gnome Alone, there are a handful of fun quips and asides. But all too often actors stumble over the attempts at rapid, referential banter, the humor lands with a thud, and the characters stop to explain their jokes. (If you have to explain your jokes you either don’t trust your audience or it’s not funny. They also ruin a Passenger 57 bit by driving it into the ground.)

 

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Jade doesn’t ask West to stretch much as an actor beyond scowling and glowering, but the action is where the film and the star shine. It works best when Jade throws down hand to hand with goons or hacks her way down hallways with a sword. During these moments, Bamford mostly stands back and captures the performers doing what they do best. Other times, unfortunately, the film over-relies on gaudy visual flourishes, like swooping slow motions or an ill-advised CGI bullet with “fuck you” etched into it. And though the action delivers, action scenes are few and far between, and when that’s the clear high point of the film, everything else fails to move the meter.

 

What Jade puts on screen feels like they had a bunch of stuff in the can and pieced it together as best they could. Which is probably not far from the truth. There’s a definite idea behind everything. Blaxploitation references abound, spaghetti western musical cues meld with hip hop and funk on the score, and the film aims to taut, twisted crime story of revenge and redemptions. But it never coheres into anything meaningful and misses the mark at every turn. As a stunt reel for Shaina West, cool; as an indicator that she should front more DTV action movies, most definitely; as a movie you should watch, maybe not. [Grade: C-]