Review of The Bad Batch (2017) by K Nife C — 26 Jun 2017

A lot of movies that I really love have received similar criticisms from their detractors. Stoker was too thinly written, The Neon Demon was just a case of style over substance, Under the Skin was too slow, Spring Breakers was too exploitative, The Bling Ring was too hollow--even Eyes Wide Shut was too overblown and self-obsessed.

I disagree with all of these complaints for their respective films, but all of them can safely be attributed to The Bad Batch. In what feels like a nearly two-hour prologue to a music video, Ana Lily Amirpour seems to have taken the artistry that she displayed well with her debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, stripped it of its commentary and subtext, and placed it with a literal cinematic wasteland.

I'm all for outside-of-the-box filmmaking, but this only creates a thin illusion of that, its truth being little more than admittedly good world building and lighting choices. I'll try to describe what there is of a recallable story now.

In a post-apocalyptic desert outside of Texas, Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is a loner who, one day, is captured by some of the many cannibals that have populated the area. Her right arm and right leg are sawed off and the assailants cauterize the wounds with a hot frying pan.

She escapes and proceeds to wander around aimlessly, where she comes across a little girl called Honey (Jayda Fink), a bodybuilder known as Miami Man (Jason Mamoa), and some others that are as desolate as their surroundings (including Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Ribisi, and Jim Carrey).

That's... about it. There's a lot of walking around-a lot of it. The movie is also almost two hours long, often relying on a synthpop soundtrack to drive its pacing. When there isn't music, though, there's a lot of silence, and if you listen hard enough, you may just be able to hear Amirpour sitting in the director's chair off camera, masturbating to her own ideas.

Here's the thing about symbolism in film: it needs to be abstract enough to elicit questions; interestingly presented enough to encourage audience involvement; and be placed within a context where viewers won't feel cheated by its blatantness.

The Bad Batch doesn't succeed in any of those ways, despite its technical flourishes. Why? Because everything shown is either far too obvious or not nearly fascinating enough to magnetize those looking at the screen.

The movie manages to get along for about 30 minutes on pastiche alone, but the remaining 85 minutes are boring and carry an unavoidable sense of pointlessness along it. This is the type of movie where the female protagonist will sit with a gun between her spread legs.

(Gee, I wonder if that's supposed to symbolize some sort of masculine power? Are guns supposed to be seen as phallic? Huuuuuh???) It's the type of movie where it has literal signs with text that read "THIS ISN'T REAL" or "FIND COMFORT" in the middle of nowhere, or where characters only seem to die so they can bleed out an ironic song choice.

Quite frankly, it feels like a feature-length script written by a film school freshman where the metaphorical imagery was written in as a placeholder for something better among revisions. Simply paying homage to grindhouse fare or creating a sort of intentionally cheap and drawn-out take on the original Mad Max doesn't signify any sort of true intentions on the part of the filmmaker.

The Bad Batch is just that: a batch of half-baked-at-the-most ideas tenuously strung together and wanly executed. To Amirpour's credit, it isn't very common to find a movie that comes off as this try-hard while also feeling so underdeveloped.

She might as well have been one of the characters with a shirt that said "THE DREAM IS IN ME", because it seems like she didn't really convey much of anything to anyone else. 3.7/10, really bad, D+, far below average, etc.