Land of Bad

dir: William Eubanks

2024

They say we live in divisive times. That people can’t even agree on the basics anymore. The tiny surges in dopamine levels we’ve been trained to crave via the algorithms of social media apps and the online world means we fight with absolute strangers about the most miniscule of things, just to feel something.

I don’t know if that’s anymore true today that it has been in the past, but I feel almost certain about one thing, and one thing only: Land of Bad is a fucking terrible name for anything, let alone a movie. Flat out fucking terrible.

A movie, an honest to god movie. With people in it. Like, multiple Hemsworths (not Chris, but eh). And Australia’s Own (New Zealander) Russell Crowe. They’re in this movie, and whatever their contributions, with a title like that, how can they feel anything but shame, shame, shame?

Like, I can imagine how someone thought it up, maybe on drugs, not good ones:
“What’s another way of saying ‘You’re in for a World of Hurt’?
- How about, “Land of Bad?”
“Put down that crack pipe, you’ve got yourself a deal!”

Stop drilling, because you’ve struck oil. Paydirt. It almost doesn’t matter what you come up with next, what tedium you will put your audience through.

Starting from that absolute low point, the only direction is probably sideways.

The point of US military thrillers is mostly to reassure American audiences that their military is still the best in the world with all the best tech and weapons and that no-one else should even bother. In this age of drone strikes and satellites spying on people, the point is still, even with that technology, the US is the biggest and baddest, and everyone else sucks.

In case you think I’m being a typical pinko leftie etc, I don’t mind that jingoistic crap. Recent Chinese and Indian movies are absolutely the same, endeavouring to endorse one party rule, loyalty to the motherland and military supremacy all in the one handsome package.

So, there are two Hemsworths on a plane, and one of them is really nervous, and the other one is really smug. So the smug Hemsworth gets to die the quickest, for being smug, and the nervous Hemsworth, being Liam, gets to live.

They, along with some other Delta chaps, who we know are really tough because they have beards and talk only in acronyms, have to parachute onto an island in the Philippines, to rescue someone, I think.

There’s a compound, with a Russian guy and his family, and then these Islamic terrorists turn up and start cutting people’s heads off.

Our supposed heroes intervene, which is very noble of them, but tactically very stupid, and then all of them except for the attractive Hemsworth (that isn’t Chris) are dead. Dead as fuck for their troubles, or as far as we know.

So Liam has to escape from guys in Toyota Hiluxes with scarves on their heads carrying AKs to get picked up by a helicopter, and he’s very nervous. That’s the only personality trait they give him here.

All he has, apart from a razor sharp haircut, and a gun, and the wits his momma gave him, is a radio with which he can communicate with two drone pilots who are sitting comfortably a world away in Las Vegas, and some other tech to confirm coordinates and such. I’ve seen Liam be decent in other things, but he could has easily been replaced with a hunk of actual wood in this and I would barely have sensed a difference. He’s not going to be accused of being too charismatic any time soon.

Lucky fuck that he is, he gets to chat with Russell Crowe, who everyone calls ‘Reaper’ like that’s a good thing, to guide him, to reassure him, and to share his endless hostility towards veganism in general and vegans in particular.

They really go out of their way to give a backstory and some kind of well-rounded nature to this character Crowe plays, which they don’t do for a single other character in the whole film. And it’s not even interesting backstory. It’s the height of tedious bullshit. They even saddle him with an added layer of difficulty by having him try to do his utmost to save the Hemsworth character while his current wife is potentially about to go into labour.

What do they say about men, that they’d rather colonise Mars or kills a thousand opponents than ever get therapy, and that they’d rather go ten hours over their shift and let their wives to go through childbirth on their own than let some guy they’ve never met down, just because he comes from the same state that you do, and no-one else cares like you do.

Ohio? Oh, okay.

The action is mostly of the shooty shooty variety, with a big boom every now and then courtesy of the drone operators, and then later thanks to some guy in a plane dropping bombs. They’re not even at war with the Philippines, and yet they’re blowing people up and shooting up the place?

Jeez, Americans just think they can do whatever they want. Along with shooting people, occasionally there’s punchy-punchy and stabby-stabby as well. It’s all pretty perfunctory.

The plot is hilarious in its simplicity. Go to one place, then go to somewhere else, then go back to the first place to cap things off. That’s not a plot so much as someone changing their minds in the middle of an Uber ride, and deciding to go back home.

There’s all this bullshit about college basketball, which has such importance to all these military types, far more so than the missions they run out of this high tech headquarters. Is it meant to make us think “now I know why they lost against the Viet Cong?” because those were my first and last very uncharitable thoughts…

We go from a Band of Brothers to Lone Survivor, back to No One Left Behind, down to a bunch of people surviving or not surviving based on whether someone answers a landline phone in time. If the flick left out or avoided any military clichés, I missed them, because I’m pretty sure they were all here.

There’s meant to be a reassuring element here in the story, in saying that we shouldn’t over-rely on technology, because what saves us in the end is the human capacity for giving a fuck and making the right decision or cancelling a bad decision in time. With “good” people like “Reaper” looking out for us, we’ll be okay.

It's all oh so convenient. There’s no acknowledgement, not even the vaguest acceptance of the moral complexities involved in blowing people up a world away often on faulty intel or bad data. No one operating these drones ever, EVER blows up the wrong thing or people, ever, doncha know.

To say that there’s no intelligence or depth to this story would be putting more effort into a review of a film with such a stupid name than it deserves.

Land of Bad exists. People were paid. There are some nice shots of Queensland standing in for the Philippines? That’s about it.

5 times if there are too many Hemsworths in a film, and one of them isn’t Chris, it’s probably not that good a film out of 10

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“Do you have artisanal tree nut fermented plant based cashew and tahini smoked vegan new cheese?” – why yes, yes I do have that very cheese in my fridge, thanks for asking - Land of Bad