Movie Review: Ana Lily Amirpour dives into the wasteland of future America in “The Bad Batch”.
The opening scene of Ana Lily Amirpour’s “The Bad Batch” may have played like twisted dystopian sci-fi during any other year. In 2017, it plays like a cautionary tale.
A sullen, beautiful young woman, Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), is being detained at the Texas/Mexico border. Early on, she’s marked with a nondescript tattoo behind her ear — one that, subconsciously or not, resembles the marks that some European Jews were forced to bear under the reign of the Third Reich.
Arlen is a part of the “Bad Batch,” a group of social undesirables who are being forcefully exiled from America. Details remain scarce throughout the early goings, but it seems as though some society-ravaging, cataclysmic event has reduced the remaining dregs of our country’s humanity to their most base and savage states. After a couple unlucky encounters, Arlen is crawling on a skateboard through the scorching heat, missing both an arm and a leg. At one point, she passes a sign that informs her that, once she crosses a certain invisible line, she’s no longer the concern of the United States government. The last two words issued in this ominous warning? “Good luck”.
Welcome to the world of “The Bad Batch,” where muscled-up cannibals rule over a barren wasteland, and a shadowy figure known as “The Dream” secretly controls the influx of food, water, and narcotics to the ravaged populace. This deranged vision of humanity’s downfall might seem too close to our ugly current reality to register as palpable fantasy, but as is her modus operandi; Ms. Amirpour has drained her film of anything resembling realism or naturalism. Instead, she opts instead to paint the entire enterprise in the trippiest possible hue of psychedelic Day-Glo neon. The result often suggests “Fury Road” by way of Burning Man.
The kitsch and camp in “The Bad Batch” are turned up to insane levels, recalling everything from George Miller’s original “Mad Max” trilogy to Quentin Tarantino’s sadistic “Kill Bill vol. 2” to the rockabilly biker movies of the 1950’s. And while the result is undeniably original and certainly never boring, “The Bad Batch” is ultimately a collection of intriguing ideas that never satisfyingly coalesces into anything greater than the sum of its parts. There is invention in nearly every frame of “The Bad Batch,” but also a certain hollowness at the film’s center that prevents it from being the great midnight movie classic that it so badly wants to be.
Amirpour arrived onto the radars of American cinephiles with her stylish debut, “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night”. That film was a kind of slinky Iranian feminist vampire fable: one that was undoubtedly indebted to Jim Jarmusch’s nighttime reveries, as well as David Lynch’s disorienting nightmare logic. I found that “Girl” was arresting but ultimately overpraised: more a collection of rapturous individual scenes than a satisfying whole.
Like “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,” “The Bad Batch” is a gorgeous pose of a movie: one that’s infinitely more concerned with attitude than feeling. Amirpour’s first two films have been produced by Vice Films — the popular bastion of hipster culture — and it’s hard not to detect that publication’s trademark hyper-ironic perspective in her own cinematic output. Both “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night” and now “The Bad Batch” are genre pastiches that lean heavily on their cool factor — so heavily, in fact, that traditional emotional engagement becomes something of a task. “The Bad Batch” certainly gets points for ambition, but it’s ultimately a movie that exists in quotation marks. It’s deemed itself a future cult classic without allowing audiences the time and space needed to discover it on their own.
Lest you think I didn’t like the movie, allow me to say there is much to admire in “The Bad Batch”. Amirpour builds her post-apocalyptic world with great care and attention to detail; even the most dismal scenarios this movie portrays are arranged with a natural visual storyteller’s flair. And the movie is genuinely bonkers: in a landscape where cinemas are being flooded with anemic superhero sequels and soul-crushing blockbusters, you owe it to yourself to see something as unhinged and seemingly untethered by studio notes as “The Bad Batch”. The film was produced by Megan Ellison through Annapurna Pictures; Ms. Ellison’s mission statement seems to be giving auteurs full reign to make their most personal projects without traditional studio interference. “The Bad Batch” certainly feels like an auteur effort, and there are individual sequences — a nighttime rave taking place in a Texas ghost town, any scene involving Keanu Reeves as a paunchy cult leader with a Pablo Escobar ‘stache, a genuinely stomach-churning amputation scene set to the groovy notes of Ace of Base — that are as dazzling as anything you’re going to see in a movie theater this year. What these scenes collectively add up to is lost on me.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into “The Bad Batch”. This might be one of those movies, like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain” (not surprisingly, the great Jodo is also an influence here), where there is no one concrete meaning, and every scene is dense with layers of druggy allegorical significance. The movie is nothing if not enigmatic: as always, Amirpour is far more interested in mood than plot. This is just as well since “The Bad Batch” doesn’t have much story to speak of. What it does have is a unique, one-of-a-kind vibe, some intriguing character acting from middle-aged 90’s icons, and one of the bleakest/funniest endings you’ll see on a big screen this year. I’m not sure what it all means, or if it even means anything, but there’s no way to walk out of the gauzy desert daydream that is “The Bad Batch” without thinking you’ve seen… something.
Back to the plot. Our heroine’s first initial sojourn beyond the American border doesn’t go well. This is the kind of world where “Bridge People” — the movie’s esoteric argot for “cannibal” — are waiting in the lurch, smacking their chops and waiting to sink their teeth into some good ol’-fashioned human meat. After Arlen loses her arm and leg (boy, there’s something about watching your severed appendage fry in a cast-iron pan) she wanders out into the desert, seeking retribution. It is there that Arlen is intercepted by The Hermit (an unrecognizable and very good Jim Carrey), a decrepit homeless wanderer whose superhuman grace almost suggests a character out of a Miyakazi animated adventure.
The Hermit ends up taking Arlen to the nearby town of Comfort. Comfort is a kind of gilded Southland paradise where stragglers can help themselves to food, water, and whatever else they see fit… so long as they pledge their allegiance to The Dream (Keanu Reeves, in what is legitimately one of the best roles of his career), a robe-wearing mountebank who is flanked at all times by a harem of pregnant, rifle-toting women wearing T-shirts that read “The Dream Is Inside Me”.
There is also the case of the hulking Miami Man (Jason Momoa, D.C.’s Aquaman), one of the bodybuilding cannibals I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. Miami Man is an imposing and largely silent brute with his name tattooed across his chest. He’s also got a rather tender piece of his daughter on his shoulder — indicating that this is the one weak spot through which this otherwise unconquerable desert warrior could be made vulnerable. Arlen and Miami Man seem to share a sort of resigned understanding about life in these unforgiving badlands, but Amirpour never develops their relationship beyond the needs of the movie’s scenery. Like characters in a Nicolas Winding Refn movie, Arlen and Miami Man mostly exist to strike a pose — though, lucky for us, both Momoa and Waterhouse happen to pose very well.
It’s a shame they aren’t ultimately asked to do more. Waterhouse has to carry much of the movie through no dialogue and by simply enduring a lot of pain and suffering (hence the “Kill Bill” comparison). However, the model/actress never makes Arlen anything more than a symbol: a cypher waiting to be defined by the movie. The less said about Giovanni Ribisi’s performance as a mentally ill street urchin who screams all the time, the better. Momoa fares better than his two co-stars: we come to fear Miami Man, and at the same time, we sense that this man has been forced to suppress his humanity in order to survive in such a heartless world. I wish Amirpour didn’t insist on giving the character an exaggerated Chicano accent (one of many curiously blunt and tactless racial stereotypes deployed throughout the movie), but I guess you take what you can get.
The movie’s best performances belong to Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves. Early in his career, Carrey was a purely physical performer: someone who could get laughs by scrunching his rubber face into unimaginable shapes and flailing about like a caged chimp attempting a ballet recital. His work in “The Bad Batch” is almost entirely physical, since the character never speaks, but what Carrey manages to communicate in this movie without traditional dialogue is astonishing. He makes The Hermit into the film’s most empathetic character, and a scene he shares with Miami Man where he asks the imposing killer to doodle a sketch of him is marvelous in the depths of emotional charity it reaches. Reeves, meanwhile, continues to be revelatory in his middle age. He turns The Dream into a kind of righteous demi-god: the kind of smooth operator who’s so smooth that you don’t exactly mind that he’s slowly draining you of all will to live.
A scene towards the end of the film where Arlen is invited into The Dream’s lavish mansion — under the assumption that she will become a part of his all-female, gun-toting army — gets to the heart of some of the themes that I think “The Bad Batch” wants to explore. When asked what her purpose is in this hopeless and futile time, Arlen intones “I want to be the savior for something.” The Dream reminds her that it costs a lot to live in Comfort: Arlen has paid with her sanity and her well-being, not to mention her limbs. During scenes like this, the movie gets close to putting its finger on the pulse of a defining theme. Is “The Bad Batch” a hallucinatory parable about transcending pain? A phantasmagoric admonition of where Trump’s America might lead us? Or is it just pure style, firing on all cylinders, but without a particular destination in mind?
Amirpour has said that she wrote “The Bad Batch” in the wake of a particularly painful breakup, and that one of the film’s most striking early images — Arlen, on her back, pushing a skateboard through the blistering heat of the desert, past a sign that reads “Find Comfort” — was the seed that begat the rest of this fascinating and frustrating picture. Amirpour may very well intend “The Bad Batch” to be a kind of personal statement. If I’m being honest, though, I don’t see it. The movie is a remarkable stylistic achievement that is wholly original and contains some scenes and images that will haunt you long after the credits have rolled. I just wish the whole thing didn’t feel like an ironic joke someone told you at a party in Silver Lake. “The Bad Batch” isn’t a bad film, but I’d love for Amirpour to let her guard down, and allow her audience to see the full, impressive spectrum of her abilities. She can’t just keep posing forever, can she? Grade: B-.
