The Bad Batch (2016) Reviews

• So much going for it - but painfully slow

  thekarmicnomad2017-08-22

  This is a dystopian movie about a young woman left out in a lawless desert with some real choice characters. This film starts off very brutally but calms down considerably after the first few scenes. The characters, acting, production and filming are really good. The story is adequate for needs. The scenery and leading lady are absolutely gorgeous. So why the low score? The pace of this film is cripplingly slow. There are tedious scenes that should be time lapsed but are run in real time, there is lots of staring and grimacing in silence. You really can go and make yourself a sandwich during this and be safe in the knowledge that you are unlikely to miss anything. A lot of potential, I really wanted to like this, but it is just so slow I was fighting to stay awake.

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• Dreadful stuff

  jtindahouse2017-10-03

  I went against my instincts when it came to watching 'The Bad Batch'. Every nerve in my body was telling me it would be dreadful, but the words cannibals, Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves and Giovanni Ribisi kept repeating over and over in my head until I finally gave in and made the fateful mistake of watching it. My god, how is it possible to make a story this boring out of cannibals? Every single thing it tries to make itself interesting with completely falls flat. When you manage to get a completely dull and forgettable performance out of Jim Carrey you know you're doing something terribly wrong. The film tries to be thought-provoking (at least it seemed like that was what it was going for) but none of the concepts it presents are in any way actually worthy of a second thought. It also goes for a lot of style, however it again falls short. In a futuristic desert wasteland setting there a thousand different concepts you could use to create an interesting story. For some reason 'The Bad Batch' chooses a story that could have been told in any setting and in any time period. That's about as lazy as story-telling gets. If you do make the mistake of selecting this one up on Netflix brace yourself for a long and painful couple of hours.

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• Desperately trying to be cool

  avenuesf2017-06-23

  This is another film that screams "I want to be a cult movie!" but just doesn't have what it takes. It starts out promising and then seems to have absolutely nowhere to go; it just becomes long, ponderous and self-indulgent. As someone who grew up going to midnight movies, "The Bad Batch" seems like its taken elements from these films ("El Topo," "Mad Max," "Kill Bill") and stitched them all together in the hopes it'll hit the mark somewhere. The performances in the film are adequate, but nothing in the script really demands much of the characters. Ms. Amirpour obviously had the support of actors like Diego Luna, Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves, all of whom are seen briefly, but I'm willing to bet they never saw much of a script. At two hours, there's probably half an hour of real material here, the rest just feels like padding.

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• Much Ado about nothing......

  stephenw-301802017-06-23

  There are three previous reviews about this film ranging from 3 of 10 to 9 of 10. I won't bore you with the lengthily details of the entire film as one reviewer did. (Would not be surprised at all if He/She had some direct connection with the making of the film, etc) I am always up for cerebral, off color, non conformist, anti-Hollywood type films and praise those who make them. I am not, however, a fan of films that aim high to be recognized as deeply artistic and thought provoking when the film fails miserably in achieving that goal. There are at least four big name actors in this mess and there is hardly any dialog through almost 2 hours of run time. This is not to say Dialog makes a film great. Often silence and facial expression and body language speaks volumes. Sadly, this is not the case in "the Bad Batch". BORING is the first word that comes to mind to describe this film. The story line and plot are all over the place. Th film is set in a supposed Apocalaptic setting with a two caste system. One being cannibals, the other the privileged, if you can call it that. To categorize this film as "Romance/ Sci-Fi" is utterly misleading. There is absolutely No romance in this film nor is there any Science Fiction in it anywhere. I would categorize this film as a Dark Drama. The only redeeming quality of the film is the score in my opinion. None of the story telling is explained or resolved and you meander through the film (as do the characters) with no purpose. Here is my take on the film.....Girl is captured, has her leg And arm amputated barbarically, which is used for food BTW, by a group of cannibals. Girl escapes, finds woman in desert, kills her and takes daughter, head cannibal sets out to find daughter, finds girl sans two limbs, sets her out on a mission to find little girl. Girl finds little girl at another "camp" of the higher caste and recovers little girl, meets Said Gorilla cannibal in desert, film ends! Two hours of time I'll never recover. Swallowing glass would be less painful then watching this again. Reviewers can wax philosophical all they want, "the bad Batch" is just plain BAD!

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• Good opening, then limps to nowhere

  keith-benoit2017-10-14

  Jim Carrey is uncredited. I wondered why. Then I watched the movie. Thing is, I watched the first 20 minutes, then put it aside, thinking that my wife's sister's family, who are fans of edgy cinema and were soon to visit us, would be down for an aprés apocalypse mindfock like this. They, like me, enjoyed the first 20 minutes. Hardly any dialogue (in a good way), some nice directorial flourishes, a more than adequate set up. Lots of promise. A good skeleton on which to put some meat. A young woman is banished to a lawless territory in the desert, is kidnapped by what turns out to be a community of iron-pumping cannibals, has an arm and a leg amputated (and her wounds cauterized, presumably so that the rest of her can also be eaten or, you know, otherwise put to use), then manages to free herself and find her way to a place called Comfort where the people eat noodles and chicken instead. I assumed what would follow would be a story of revenge and rescue, the goodies of Comfort taking down the baddies at the Venice Beach barbecue, maybe with some explanation as to how the people of Comfort get access to gasoline, photocopiers, rice noodles and all the recreational pharma you could hope for. (My guess was that there would be some connection to a group outside the lawless land, perhaps some sort of probably not-so-kosher arrangement between Keanu Reeves's Jim Jones knockoff and his inworld suppliers.) No answers came. None. Despite a severe underbite, Jim Carrey managed to chew what little scenery there was and he was still the best thing in the film by a long walk. The moment he hands Momoa a snowglobe was when I knew I wasn't coming back. The movie had left me in my own offworld without a clue where I was going or what would happen to me when I got there. Loooong story short, the girl falls in love with Momoa's Atkins aficionado after eating some Guatemalan insanity peppers and tripping out like she ate a bad oatmeal cookie at a Grateful Dead concert. There's some other stuff. A kid who likes spaghetti elbows more than actual elbows and who cries when her Daddy and her new stepmom eat her pet rabbit; a homeless philosopher dude played by Ribisi, channeling an amalgam of all those fidgety weirdos that Brad Pitt used to play; and almost no dialogue not spoken by Reeves, whose explanation of where his dookie go goes on for about nine minutes. But it is bad enough to be a fun watch with friends who like movies made without scripts by people who can't make a movie without a script. Which is most people. Seriously, I want to know the backstory to this debacle. My guess: Super-talented young director makes great movie, gets noticed, then gets one of those bags with the two dollar signs on it and access to Harvey Weinstein's rolodex while he's in the bath. But the movie has to be made in 10 days because Jim has a showing of his larger canvases at a gallery where people will hand him bags with two dollar signs on them because he's Jim Carrey, not because he's actually a talented sculptor and painter. Or Jim shook the snowglobe and handed it to the director, saying (with only his eyes), "Before the snow has settled within, the script must be written."

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