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Monday, June 26, 2017

Movie Hype: The Bad Batch Is Just Bad Review

Neon's first film was Colossal and it was an instant classic. It's fourth out of the gate is the forgettable and unpleasing The Bad Batch. I think Neon may have just gotten it for it trying to be out there with cannibals, but cannibal can't save this film form being boring.

How a story about body-building cannibals, a female protagonist missing an arm and a leg and Keanu Reeves as a messiah/Mayor can't be entertaining is astounding. Or it would be if The Bad Batch just wasn't such a slow burn with a pay-off of zero. Director/writer Ana Lily Amirpour has made a slow, uneventful dystopian movie that has all the right pieces and just wastes them. The look, the feel of her terrible unforgiving Texas where criminals are dispatched to live has so much fun possibility and that possibility drys out like a tumbleweed.

"There's a love story in here?," that's what I said in my head when the film put it self out there as part romance. There ain't no romance other than a few minutes of creepy horniness between the lead Arlen, played by Suki Waterhouse and Miami Man/ a cannibal played by Jason Momoa.

The Bad Batch doesn't even fall into the category of it's so bad it's good, it's as though the director herself got high, forgot to add plot to the movie and finished it. Avoid it and give the director a gig as a DP or some other position, because she sure can't write or direct.