‘Spades’ Review: Johnny Yong Bosch Makes a Scrappy Supernatural Revenge Movie

There is something admirable about watching a filmmaker swing much bigger than the budget probably allows. Johnny Yong Bosch does exactly that with Spades, his feature directorial debut, a bloody action-revenge thriller that feels like The Crow or Ghost Rider stripped down to street level. It is messy, overlong, and occasionally held back by uneven story and performances, but Bosch clearly has an eye for action filmmaking.

Detective James Bishop (Jason Narvy) is a military veteran still haunted by watching his fellow soldiers die in combat. Now working as a detective, Bishop is observant and surprisingly sharp, but his personal life is falling apart. He has constant visions and flashbacks to watching his best friend, and military buddy Jimmy (Johnny Yong Bosch) get shot down on the battlefield. It makes sense that his life is unraveling.  His wife is dead, his relationship with his daughter Lana (Maya Brattkus) is strained, and visions invade his waking life.  Meanwhile, a trafficking operation connected to Yakuza figure Saito (Nobuaki Shimamoto) is targeting young women across the city. Then somebody starts targeting the traffickers. 

A masked vigilante called Spade appears, bodies begin piling up, and skull-branded Spades playing cards are left behind. When Lana becomes caught in the middle, Bishop’s investigation turns personal.

Bosch is essentially making a low-budget supernatural street hero movie, complete with revenge, spirituality, organized crime, gallons of blood, and questions about whether vengeance and justice are remotely the same thing. The problem is that Spades takes nearly two hours to tell a story that probably needed 75 or 80 minutes max..

Bishop’s military flashbacks initially work because they explain his trauma and establish the emotional connection between him and the vigilante mystery. Eventually, though, we get it. The constant jumping between combat memories and the present stops providing new information and begins padding out a narrative that should be racing forward. I also found myself wishing the movie spent more time developing Spades himself.

Bishop gets his ass kicked so frequently that it almost becomes a running joke, while the genuinely fascinating part of the mythology, (the vigilante, his abilities, and how this supernatural revenge figure came into existence), remains comparatively underexplored. Bishop quickly wondering whether his dead military friend could somehow be responsible isn’t particularly realistic detective work, but honestly? I went with it. This ain’t Zodiac. We’re dealing with spiritualized vengeance and masked people slaughtering traffickers.

The performances are considerably less consistent. Some actors fully inhabit their roles while others sound like they’re remembering dialogue moments before saying it. That’s one of those limitations that becomes much more visible in independent genre filmmaking because everything depends on selling an already heightened reality. However, where Spades genuinely impresses is behind the camera.

Bosch, perhaps unsurprisingly given his long career in martial arts, stunt work, acting, and voice performance, understands movement and visual storytelling. His direction doesn’t have that anonymous coverage-heavy look that sinks so many low-budget action movies. Shots feel considered. Spaces feel inhabited. Bosch’s cinematography isn’t afraid of color, contrast, or visual depth, even as the subject matter gets increasingly grim. The gore works too. When violence happens, Bosch lets it get nasty. Blood splatter has weight, injuries look convincing, and the movie doesn’t suddenly become shy when it’s time to deliver on its revenge-film promise. Sometimes the action scenes are hard to track because the camera moves so much. But there is enough dynamism there to keep it interesting.

Spades absolutely needs tightening. There is a sharper, meaner 80-minute movie buried inside these 116 minutes. But as a first feature, it shows that Bosch knows how he wants an action movie to look and feel. The story may stumble getting there, but the filmmaking itself suggests this former Power Ranger has considerably more directing left in him.