"The Bad Batch": review

Jason Momoa as Miami Man with the curiously morphing tattoo

[WARNING: spoilers.]

"The Bad Batch" came out in 2016. It is directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, and it stars Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves, and Jayda Fink. There are also appearances by Jim Carrey, Giovanni Ribisi, and Diego Luna. I remember seeing the trailer for this film several years ago and thinking it was quirky, but it wasn't until I recently joined Netflix (right as Netflix has begun tanking) that I finally got around to watching this weird, weird film.

As the movie begins, we hear voices over loudspeakers telling prison guards to be careful and to avoid eye contact with prisoners who are part of the Bad Batch. These prisoners are supposedly the worst of the worst. Each Bad Batch member gets a numerical tattoo placed behind the right ear, and while all of this feels more or less like regular civilization, we follow twentysomething Bad Batcher Arlen (Waterhouse) as she's released from prison in the Territory of Texas out into the wide wasteland of what appears to be the United States of America, which has become a sprawling badland on the order of the desert from the Mad Max movies or the Cursèd Earth of the Judge Dredd comics. Arlen eats what is probably her last burger and, toting a gallon jug full of water, she heads out into the desert, a free woman who will likely die of heatstroke. As Darwinian luck would have it, Arlen is almost immediately caught by members of a tribe of cannibals who take her to their wreckage-strewn compound, chain her to the ground, drug her, and saw off her right arm and right leg to eat. But Arlen is a fighter, and she manages to kill one of the cannibals and make her escape on a skateboard, propelling herself weakly across the desert on her back until, literally on her last leg, she is found by a weathered, mute nomad (a nearly unrecognizable Jim Carrey). The nomad takes her to a fortress-town called Comfort, which turns out to be run by a gentle cult-leader figure who calls himself The Dream (Reeves). Arlen stays in town a few months, healing and acquiring a prosthetic leg. She then wanders out of town with a gun, probably with vague plans of revenge, and she discovers the wife and daughter of the cannibals' leader while they're foraging (Yolonda Ross and Jayda Fink, respectively). Arlen kills the wife, Maria, without knowing who she is, and she allows the seemingly mute daughter, Miel, to follow her back to Comfort. The cannibals' leader, Miami Man (Momoa, affecting what's supposed to be a Cubano accent), discovers his wife's body and begins looking for his missing daughter.

That's about half the plot right there. What happens next is, to the film's credit, pretty hard to predict. There were a lot of things I expected to happen that didn't happen in the way I imagined. The scriptwriter (Amirpour) deserves a tip of the hat for her originality. While the plot is actually fairly simple, it contains a surprising number of twists and turns.

I suppose the film's main virtue is its quirk factor. We've gotten used to seeing Jason Momoa and Keanu Reeves in action-movie-hero roles, so it's a welcome change of pace to see Momoa as a cannibal carving up bloody human corpses for dinner, and Reeves as a cult leader who is proud that he provides his fortress-compound with plumbing and drugs while he's surrounded by his harem of pregnant, gun-toting women. Suki Waterhouse is a new, fresh face to me as well, and I'll put on my Dirty Old Man hat to confess that, yes, she's easy on the eyes, and director Amirpour isn't afraid to showcase Waterhouse via all sorts of sexy, crotch- and butt-level camera angles. Waterhouse somehow manages to be alluring despite being a double amputee (thanks to CGI, of course), and I admit my inner Randy Man was leering at her one-armed, one-legged body and growling, I'd fuck that. I recall there was a discussion a couple years ago about how "Wonder Woman" director Patty Jenkins made Wonder Woman and the Amazons sexy without overly sexualizing them, whereas Zack Snyder, in his "Justice League," portrayed the Amazons with a lot more exposed skin, and his camera angles on Gal Gadot were often crass and salacious. Should we therefore despise Amirpour for being sexually exploitative or congratulate her for not caring what the PC crowd thinks?

In the end, though, the film becomes a bit of a drag. Too many shots are long, slow, and deliberate in an attempt to create a sense of profundity, but the plot really isn't that deep. This could have been a meditation on whatever the new American reality was (why did Texas finally secede? what happened to make America into Mad Max's playground?). Keanu Reeves's character, The Dream, gets some interestingly philosophical lines, but it's established early on that Arlen, our protagonist, isn't much of a deep thinker. (In one scene,Arlen looks up at the sky without understanding that she's seeing the Milky Way above, implying she has little to no education.) We also never learn much about Arlen's background, so that too is a missed opportunity to create some depth. I get the feeling the movie is hinting at certain deep ideas, but it can't be bothered to explore any of them. Oh, yes: no discussion of the movie's flaws would be complete without noting that Momoa's "Miami Man" tattoo changes shape thanks to a continuity error. At first, the tattoo seems to show "MiamiMan," with no space between the two words, then suddenly, it shows "Miami Man," with a distinct space between the two words. I couldn't un-see that at all.

The movie also has one potential conflict that never gets resolved by the end of the film, leaving us to ponder the fate of our main characters. At the risk of spoiling things, I'll say that Miami Man and Arlen end up as a sort of weird couple (and really, this comes out of nowhere given their previous conflict), with Miami Man's daughter Miel (both French and Spanish for honey) suddenly able to talk after spending 99% of the film mute. The problem is this: Arlen shot and killed Maria, Miami Man's wife/mate, right in front of Miel. Miami Man doesn't know any of this, but with Miel suddenly able to talk, she could reveal the ugly truth about Arlen at any moment. Miami Man and Arlen might be a couple by the end of the film, but we're left with the impression that little Miel could ruin things whenever she wants. Was this a deliberate choice by screenwriter Amirpour, or was it just sloppy writing?

In the end, while I'm kind of glad I finally saw this film, I have no desire to go back and see it again. The quirkiness of the film is enough to make an elevator pitch, but the film doesn't possess enough substance to back that pitch up. I can see how the film might have been fun for the actors, who were surely keen to defy typecasting, but for us viewers, the film ended up being more of a chore than anything else.