“This here’s the Bad Batch. We ain’t good. We’re bad.” - The Dream
The Bad Batch is a 2016 sci-fi drama film about a girl who is dropped in the middle of a desert wasteland, and forced to fend for herself among all of the other people who have been cast out from the rest of society like her. The film stars Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves, and Giovanni Ribisi, and is written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour.
I began watching The Bad Batch with high hopes, and came away feeling disappointed and underwhelmed. The film has some things going for it, but there were so many issues and problems, that I found myself growing bored of it not even halfway in. The film was entirely too long, and the runtime could’ve been cut back at least forty minutes, if not even more. The pacing is really terrible, and the majority of the scenes in the film drag on for far too long. Most scenes in this movie are just long, extended scenes of characters walking around, or sitting in silence as opposed to anything important or significant going on. There was one scene in particular involving the main character walking through the desert at night while high on hallucinogens that I found to be terribly boring, and even annoying. I feel like this movie had so much potential to be a really cool dystopian sci-fi flick, but instead, that potential was wasted on a lackluster and barely nonexistent storyline, and bad writing.
That said, there are a few really cool scenes, but those scenes are incredibly brief, which is a disappointment. The cast is great, and all of the acting in this film was pretty good, especially on the part of Keanu Reeves, who I’ll get to in a moment. However, because of the writing, you never care about any of the characters, and none of them really have any big moments that make you feel attached to them.
I mentioned Keanu Reeves earlier in this review. He was great in this movie, and he was consistently funny, and interesting. His delivery is hilarious, and he would’ve totally been a character that I could get behind had he not had so little screen time.
The music is amazing, and was an absolute joy to listen to. The camerawork and the visual effects were also beautiful, and impossible to look away from. If The Bad Batch has anything going for it, it would be the consistently dazzling visuals. Every frame of this film is something that I could hang on my wall, and look at for days at a time.
In the end, The Bad Batch was an overall disappointment that was too self indulgent and pretentious to really achieve much worth noting. There was so much talent and potential wasted here, and it really frustrates me that a movie that I was looking forward to seeing this much is something that I will probably forget about in a couple of days.
Rating: R
Grade: D+
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