Chloë Grace Moretz saves WWII monster movie ‘Shadow in the Cloud’

No idea is too dumb for Roseanne Liang’s crazy movie “Shadow in the Cloud,” and that’s the best thing about it. The worst too.

Look, I like movies that disturb as much as anyone. Maybe more. As long as they’re carried away with a certain poise, a difficult balance to take the story seriously even when you blow the rules out the window.

Or cockpit. Most of the film (★★★ ½ out of five; rated R; theatrically and streaming Friday on Apple TV, Vudu, and FandangoNOW) takes place in a B-17 bomber during World War II. But ultimately, it goes too far, even in the context of the story it tells. This does not detract from the performance of Chloë Grace Moretz, around which the film is structured. She’s really good, making it incredible… OK, not believable. But nice.

And it’s never less than fun in your seat.

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Moretz plays Maude Garrett, a woman in a flight suit who makes her way on the plane, sporting an arm in a sling and a black eye with orders to carry a secret package. The all-male crew – an absurdly chauvinistic crew, insulting to the point of being abusive – don’t exactly congratulate themselves on their presence.

But she has orders signed by a major that no one wants to cross, so they put her in a turret below while continuing to make lewd sexual comments about her as she listens on the radio.

Garrett is tough, however. She’s clearly dealt with this stuff before. All that matters to him is the security of the package.

Then things get weird. Like we knew they would.

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The story continues

Liang begins the film with an Allied Air Force training animated short about gremlins, the monsters that plague airplanes (and, the cartoon insists, are nothing more than an excuse. for crew misfires).

What if gremlins are real? If you’ve ever seen the famous “Twilight Zone” episode “Nightmare at 20,000ft”, you know this isn’t the first script to ask or answer this question. The toxic shakes of the crew already think Garrett is insane, so when she begins to see not only Japanese fighter jets but a gremlin on the plane’s wing, they act with predictable imbecility. But now it’s not just their toxic ignorance that she is fighting.

Of course, she is right. And as one less backward crew member (Taylor John Smith) puts it, she’s more of an aviator than any of them ever will be.

This is not a spoiler. Most of the movie involves Garrett fighting one thing or another, whether it’s shooting down planes, fending off gremlins, or risking his life to keep the secret package safe. “You have no idea how far I’m going to go” to keep this safe, she yells at the gremlin at one point, and she isn’t laughing.

Moretz is good at it all. A long section of the movie is just her sitting in the turret, talking with the crew as they abuse her, stabbing her to make sure the package isn’t damaged. It’s kind of a mini-version of Tom Hardy in “Locke”, when Hardy spends the whole movie driving a car, the camera has basically been training on him the entire time. It’s an incredible performance.

So in its own way, it’s Moretz’s, but it’s a different kind of movie. Yet it has to keep our attention from vanishing, and it does.

Finally, the battles overflow with the fantastic and the ridiculous. You have to be prepared to accompany the journey to a certain extent to last even five minutes of a movie like this. Even if you are, there is some real nonsense that threatens to get you out of the movie completely.

Luckily, Moretz is here to bring you back. She can’t make the stupid sublime, but in “Shadow in the Cloud,” she at least makes it something worth sticking around.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: ‘Shadow in the Cloud’ Review: Chloë Grace Moretz’s WWII Movie Is Crazy