The Pitch: Someone needs to make a Mad Max
movie at half speed.
This is a case of a trailer making me too curious to forget about a movie. The Bad Batch can be lazily written off as a Mad Max ripoff, and Ana Lily Amirpour would have a hard time arguing that she wasn't in some way influenced by those films. Once you accept that on a production design level, it's very much its own movie. Amirpour is in love with her visuals, and on some level, I can't blame her for that. They're some striking visuals. Suki Waterhouse, Jason Mamoa, and Keanu Reeves all look very distinctive and fit in this exaggerated wasteland. I didn't even recognize Jim Carrey until the third time he showed up. I love how random that cast is.
The thing I most like about the movie led directly to what I liked the least: there's only enough plot to get a character from point A to point B. I mean that literally. This movie is mostly just an exploration. Amirpour wants to show off the different locations in this world and these odd characters. I like good world building, so I'm happy to explore with her. Maybe not for two hours though. Anything over 90 minutes needs a bit more plot. After a while, I got to a point when I would look at the screen for a new scene, then look away for a couple minutes and wait until something happened before I looked again. The characters barely get fleshed out. The mysterious stranger idea is nice, but it went a little too far with Suki Waterhouse, who I still hardly knew at all by the end. That said, this laid a great foundation. If there was a Bad Batch 2*, I'd watch it.
*Or Badder Batch, B2: The Baddest Batch, The Below Average Batch (a prequel), or The Rotten Batch.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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