Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey, & Jason Momoa Star in This Cannibal Thriller

The big picture

• Ana Lily Amirpour's
  The bad lot
  combines daring themes such as cannibalism and cults in a post-apocalyptic world to create original and absurd scenarios. The film features a star-studded cast, including Keanu Reeves, Jason Momoa and Jim Carrey.
• The bad lot
  it focuses more on creating moments of comfort in despair than the usual post-apocalyptic survival story.
• Amirpour crafts films that are authentic to his vision, climbing subcultures and absurd settings for those who appreciate his unconventional style.

Ana Lily Amirpour he's like a cutting-edge chef, continually experimenting with each creation by throwing so many disparate elements into a pot and seeing what comes out. His debut film, A girl walks home alone at nightit was a vampire tale that combined Jean-Luc Godard cold with Francis Ford Coppola formal control His most recent film, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moonwas a wild night of madness in New Orleans that took the 80s buddy movie formula and injected it with superpowers and a sense of street-level grime in league with the Safdie brothers i Sean Baker. Between these two films is arguably the strangest film of his career, the completely insane mix it is The bad lot, taking a page from the vast annals of post-apocalyptic art and acid westerns, while mixing it with pure star power that keeps the audience on their toes.

What is 'The Bad Batch' about?

In an inexplicable post-apocalyptic world where the American government expels from the country the undesirables called “the bad lot”, Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is one of these undesirables. After being kidnapped by a gang of cannibals, they cut off one of her arms and one of her legs to eat. He escapes by using a nearby skateboard, where he encounters a wandering hermit (Jim Carrey), which takes her to a commune called Comfort. The Comfort has everything you'd want to survive in a desert wilderness: food, water, shelter, and plenty of drugs. It is led by a mysterious cult leader named The Dream (Keanu Reeves), who styles himself a Vegas Elvis lizard and stays in power by using his various concubines to carry his babies and run his drug operation. While exploring the wilderness outside of Comfort, he brings a girl named Honey (Jayda Fink) back in town, which puts cannibalistic leader Miami Man (Jason Momoa), Honey's father, on his trail. When Honey is swept away in her sleep because Arlen was too distracted by drugs to look at her, she must team up with Miami Man to save her.

All in all, it's a pretty absurd combination. We have cannibalism, a destroyed and rebuilt society and cults. Did I forget to mention the amount of star power, which makes absolutely no sense? We've got Momoa in full shirtless warrior glory, we've got Keanu channeling his inner guru in a way reminiscent of previous roles in films like thumbsucker, and Jim Carrey walking in and out of the movie without any acknowledgment or any sense of why you'd normally cast him in the first place. Oh, and we throw in cameos from Giovanni Ribisias an irritating layman who rambles on about the “one thing” you must never forget, and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance Diego Luna like the Comfort DJ. What's more puzzling is, except for Keanu, none of the casting is angled in a way that asks you to remember the actor's previous work and see this role as a change in the context of his career. Momoa hadn't really established the star persona he is now at the time of this film, and his role has very little of Aquaman's energy. Carrey's inclusion, meanwhile, can be downright jarring, as you barely recognize him for most of the running time, and his character serves as little more than a plot device and side distraction, with only a little of his signature Mr. Fantastic body magic that works effortlessly. worked for decades.

'The Bad Batch' doesn't care about expectations or momentum

It's more than plausible that if I were to describe the setting and theme of this movie (you know, cannibalism and cults in a post-apocalyptic wasteland), you'd imagine a Mad Max story that George Miller had rejected as too depressing. But instead, the film is much less in love with the nasty survival elements and more fixated on marinating in the moments when people are trying to get comfortable in the face of an unpromising future. While there's still human carnage and a sense of hopelessness, the number of scenes devoted to having drug visions and stretching moments of silence and interpersonal tension moves into meandering territory. It feels like The bad lot he had about 90 minutes of story and he stretched them 120 minutes just making the characters vibrate with each other, becoming elements of a series of music videos. to think Cormac McCarthy stories through Alexander Jodorowsky Westerns like The Moleor the explosion of films in the late 1960s devoted to exploring the effects of drugs, such as The trip. It's a movie whose enjoyment will depend entirely on whether you're on its wavelength, and if you just happen to take some sort of psychotropic drug while watching it, all the better.

This is not to say that the film has no sense of conventional narrative structure or tension. Arlen is still built to be a stand-in protagonist, one who only seeks safety and is willing to fight those who threaten her. It takes time for her and Honey to develop a connection, though it's based less on understanding each other and more on the basic need to protect a child from the dangers of the world. Even characters like Miami Man and the Dream, who are seemingly antagonists, get moments that humanize them, like Miami Man sharing his story of emigrating from Cuba or the Dream sharing his philosophy about treating animals with respect. But the outline of the plot mechanics could be scribbled on a napkin, and it's hard to feel too much suspense when the film is more concerned with devoting another three-minute montage to its next needle-drop (although, you have to say it, the music choices are incredible). This devotion to musical moments leads to some of the film's best moments, like Miami Man killing a woman for food while Culture Club's “Karma Chameleon” plays in his headphones, or a montage of perfectly sculpted cannibal bodybuilders pumping iron to the tune of Die Antwoord's “Fish Paste.” It's those moments where Amirpour's stamp is most pronounced, fusing different strands of pop culture to form a distorted image of Americana.

“The Bad Batch's Ana Lily Amirpour is the kind of filmmaker we need more of

Amirpour's cinema can be described as many things, but above all it is truly original. Too many filmmakers work too hard to make their films easily marketable, either to audiences or studio executives, where obvious talent is somewhat hampered by expectations. Ana Lily Amirpour is not one of those people, as her three films each serve as distinct fragments of her sensibility that seek to gloss over the oddities of specific subcultures as much as they aim to poke fun at absurd scenarios. His films are each filtered through his own aesthetic and come from completely different sources in pop history, showcasing his broad sense of taste. His films are all vibration checks, designed to be as authentic to his unpleasant vision that inevitably most people will probably be put off by what he has to say. But for those who can keep up with her and delve into the oddities of her worlds, these people are in for a real treat. Even in a movie like The bad lottakes cannibalism and hellish desert landscapes and drug-induced hysteria, and combines them into something quite tasty.

The bad lot is available to stream on Netflix in the United States

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