The Keanu Reeves Project - The Bad Batch

THE BAD BATCH (2016) - The Dream

Well, I'm rapidly approaching the end here.  I've looked to see what's left and the answer is apparently, not much.  I'm going to be skipping over a few future movies, including "Always Be My Maybe," (due to Keanu only appearing in one scene, although I'll touch on that single scene) and "Toy Story 4" as it's voice only and I have no idea how much Keanu is even in it.  I also won't be doing the Spongebob Squarepants movie.  That means that counting today's post there are only nine more movies to go...thankfully two of them are "John Wick," and a third is "Bill and Ted Face The Music," which I've already seen three times even though it came out barely a month ago.

Unfortunately for me, "The Bad Batch" is notably NOT a John Wick movie nor is it a Bill and Ted movie.  No, it's basically a boring version of "Mad Max" mixed with a live action version of the video game series Fallout, which also attempts (and fails) to be philosophical towards the end while also attempting to shove in a completely unnecessary (and absurd) love story?  

Ugh.  

Okay, "The Bad Batch" is not nearly as bad as many other movies I've watched so far but I feel like you really have to go out of your way to somehow make a movie about a dystopic wasteland full of cannibals, knife fights and uzi toting female bodyguards starring Jason Momoa, Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves absolutely boring.

Alright, full-on spoilers ahead, which is fine because we both know you're never going to watch "The Bad Batch."

The movie opens with a bit of voiceover and a young woman, who we learn much later on is named Arlen, being cast out into the desert outside of Texas with little more than a backpack and a jug of water.  Just to give a little context as to what's going on because there is literally no dialogue for about the first 25 minutes of this movie, in the world of "The Bad Batch," America's "undesirables" are cast off into the Texas/Mexican desert, forced to survive on their own.

Warning: You are about to waste the next two hours of your life

What makes these people undesirable?  Well, hell if I know because it's never really discussed.  In fact, we don't ever even learn why the main character of this story, Arlen, is forced into the Bad Batch Wasteland.  My list of infinite questions about this story will come later, condensed though because it's hard to write an infinite list of anything, you know, because math.  

Barely five minutes into her banishment, Arlen is captured by two women who chase her down in a golf cart and bring her back to their camp, which is infested with body building cannibals, led by Jason Momoa, who I'm just going to call Drogo from here on out because that's basically the character he's playing anyway, except instead of speaking Dothroki he speaks English with what we later learn is a Cuban accent.  

Being at cannibal camp fucking sucks.  For one, they have a boombox that appears to only play old Ace of Base cd's and also they will cut off your arms and legs and eat them in front of you.  The constant Ace of Base might actually be worse.  Also, the cell reception is terrible.

It's bad enough you've got me tied up in chains here, but could you at LEAST turn off Ace of Base?

After having one leg and one arm chopped up and eaten, Arlen kills one of her captors with a loose piece of rebar and escapes on a skateboard because sure, other than working out 24/7, cannibals love skateboarding, they are just lazy and always forget to put their skateboards away after a gnarly grind sesh.  

540 McTwist

After rolling through the desert for an unknown amount of time, she's discovered by a scavenging weirdo who appears several times in the movie.  The scavenger pushes around a shopping cart and is never given a name, so I'm just going to call him Cart Man.

A far more entertaining Cartman

Cart Man drops her off at an encampment called Comfort and goes on about his merry way in the desert before the movie gives us a "five months later" tag.  So five months have gone by and Arlen has been living in Comfort, which although terrible, seems a lot nicer than Cannibal Camp.  There are street vendors selling noodles, there is a LITERAL skate park, and you can even get a prosthetic limb, which Arlen has done so she's now able to walk around.  Super.  Unfortunately, Arlen is only able to get a leg and not an arm, which is really too bad because this movie would have been a lot better if she had a sweet chain saw attachment.  

Better movie

Oh, and Comfort also has a town weirdo, played inexplicably by Giovani Ribisi.  He spends most of his time wandering around town mumbling to himself and there's literally no reason for this character to exist nor for it to be played by a recognizable face.  

Giovani Ribis as Mumble McGee

We briefly cut back to Cannibal Camp, where Drogo a is painting a picture of his nameless daughter and hey, he might be a cannibal and all but he's actually a very talented artist.  Don't put this man in a box!  After finishing up his painting he goes outside to visit another captive, who he proceeds to butcher and eat and one of his companions complains "I'm sick of this shit!" presumably upset about having to eat yet another bad batch outcast.  

Okay, I'm about 30 minutes into this movie and there's barely been any dialogue, but we learn that Arlen has procured a gun (from where?) and has her own little room in comfort, complete with a mirror and a bed.  Classy shit.  For fun, Arlen likes to take walks outside the protective walls of Comfort and she happens to spot Drogo's dining companion and daughter scavenging at the local dump.  Arlen approaches and murders the woman because you know, she was part of the crew that ate Arlen's arm.  Arlen heads back to comfort with Drogo's child in tow, which seems a bit asinine to me.  Like, you're already living in bad batch dystopian wasteland AND you're missing an arm and a leg and now you are bringing along another mouth to feed?  Like, let this kid fend for herself.

Anyway, the entire sequence is witnessed by Cart Man, who is approached the next day by Drogo, who is out in the desert on his motorcycle looking for his missing kid.  Drogo asked Cart Man if he's seen his daughter, showing him a pretty realistic drawing of her.  Cart Man, who is apparently mute, does charades to let Drogo know that he's got information but he wants to be drawn first in exchange.

So Drogo sits down and does a pretty great sketch of Cart Man, and it's only at this point in this movie that I realized that Cart Man has been Jim Carrey this entire time.  Jim Carrey, what the fuck are you doing in this movie?  After the drawing is done, Cart Man takes the picture of the girl and writes, "Find Comfort."

Draw me like one of your French girls

Back at Comfort, it's evening which means it's dance party time.  Yes, there is a full on rave at Comfort which looks a lot like that rave in Zion from "The Matrix Reloaded" but with more LSD.  Arlen is there with the child but loses track of her after taking the acid that everyone is given.  Who has the time to pay attention to a little girl when there's acid to do?  Oh, and I should also note, that nearly fifty minutes into this movie, WE FINALLY GET OUR FIRST GLANCE OF OUR HERO, KEANU REEVES.

Keanu comes out during the rave and stands on top of one of their makeshift buildings and gives a speech about how "we're all the bad batch" and "it's time to wake up, it's time to find THE DREAM!"  He's also surrounded by a cadre of young women (some of which are noticeably pregnant), all of whom carry uzis and have matching t-shirts that say "The Dream is Inside me."  To note, Keanu looks like a porn version of Jim Jones, which I'm pretty sure is intentional since he's basically playing a cult leader.  Keanu's name in this is apparently "The Dream," so that makes those shirts...interesting to say the least.  

Meet me in Comfort

By this point in the movie, Arlen had purchased a pet rabbit for the kid, but the kid is a little worthless idiot, so she loses the rabbit during the rave and it's found by Keanu and one of his pregnant cult members and they take the girl into The Dream's residence.

By now, Arlen is on a very serious acid trip and so she wanders out beyond the walls of Comfort, because sure, when you're tripping on acid and basically living in Fallout 3 it seems like a great idea to wander around the desert by yourself.  And wouldn't you know it, she stumbles right into Drogo who may or may not recognize her as his dinner several months ago.

Instead of straight up murdering her, he waits until the next morning and asks Arlen if she's seen his daughter but she lies and says no but he replies that he's going to take them both back to Comfort in order to find the kid.  On the way back they are accosted by a lone scavenger who offers to trade some gasoline for Arlen, but Drogo isn't having any of that so he murders the man and cuts off his arm for a snack for later.

How's my shading?

Now I have no idea how fucking long she wandered in the desert while she was high but apparently it was a really long fucking way because they have to fucking camp for a night on their way back.  It makes NO SENSE, but that's fine because you can just throw it on the pile of unanswered questions this movie poses.

While they camp for the night, Arlen questions Drogo how he ended up in the Bad Batch and he tells her that he came to America from Miami and was tossed in the Bad Batch because he was illegal and didn't have his papers, which is when I realized this movie is actually the Republican wet dream.  I mean, think about it - the movie takes place in Texas where there's a giant fence (which we only catch a glimpse of at the beginning) separating us from the wasteland, which is a place you can throw all the undesirable, ie undocumented folks.  You can probably even take their kids away from them first and stuff them into cages.

Arlen tricks Drogo into dropping his guard and grabs a knife off of him, but he's still approximately nine times her size so he's a little unfazed by her chicanery and is about to turn the tides back around when he's suddenly shot out of the darkness by some random lone traveler, who saves Arlen and takes her back to Comfort.

En garde!

The next day, Cart Man finds Drogo passed out in the desert and helps him heal by feeding him a dead bird - you do know the magical healing powers of dead crows, right?  Back at Comfort, Arlen is searching for the kid and uses the town's copy machine to make copies of a drawing of the kid she lifted off Drogo to pass around town while she's searching for her.  

She eventually sees that the kid has been taken in by The Dream and his gaggle of women and convinces them to take her inside, where The Dream is basically living like a goddamn king amongst the rest of the squalor that is the town of Comfort.  He's got fancy chairs, ice cubes, and a goddamn swimming pool among other things.  We also learn that that The Dream is responsible for all of the drugs in Comfort because if you can keep people high all the time I guess they won't realize that one person is controlling all of the wealth.  I think there might be a message here.

Hold up, you guys have ice water, a swimming pool, AND marijuana?

Keanu proceeds to give his second monologue of the movie, where he talks to Arlen about shit.  No, literally, he talks to her for two minutes about actual shit and how he's responsible for the sewer system in comfort and he's the reason people aren't walking around in their own shit.  Arlen convinces him that she wants to stay with The Dream (this seems reasonable because he's got a goddamn swimming pool in his house while the rest of Comfort is essentially a series of stacked shipping containers).  

The Dream gets high.  Something I wish I'd also done to get through this movie

She's given her own private room, where she heads to the bathroom and takes her gun out of secret compartment in her prosthetic leg, which might be the most clever part of this entire movie.  She waits behind the bedroom door for one of Keanu's ladies to come fetch her, which is where I should note that this movie must have a dozen or more shots of the back of Arlen's shorts.  I never figured out what message this was supposed to send, other than that the actress playing Arlen probably could have filled these out better.  

One of dozens of shots like this

Anyway, Arlen pulls the gun and demands the release of the kid and escapes with her out of Keanu's palace and out of Comfort entirely.  Outside the walls, Drogo is waiting and they are reunited.  The kid complains that she's hungry and she wants spaghetti, because that's what she ate at Keanu's house.  And you know, I'm guessing, spaghetti probably tastes a lot better than human leg.  And then in one of the stupidest lines of the movie Arlen says to Drogo, "What are you doing now?  Do you want to hang out or something?"

Hang out or something?  This is the literal goddamn wasteland and this guy ate your leg.  Drogo is like sure, and instead of spaghetti, he slaughters the pet rabbit and the three of them eat it around a campfire and the movie, which somehow became a romcom in the last five minutes, mercifully ends.

So like, what's your sign?

I...did not enjoy this movie, mainly because it's pretty fucking boring.  It ends with an attempt at a message of survival or love or something but honestly, who could after two hours of near nothing. 

Here's where I usually add my scattered thoughts, but instead of that how about just some of the many questions this movie left me with:

*Why the fuck does Comfort have a copy machine?  Who is making copies of anything here and why?  Are they having board meetings to determine where and when the next rave is?  Where is the copy machine getting power from?

Comfort's very own Kinko's.  The customer service SUCKS.

*For that matter, where does anything get its power from?  The rave DJ has a goddamn mobile DJ booth with full on flashing lights, how?

*Speaking of power, where's all the gasoline coming from?  At least a few people have some sort of motor vehicles, it's coming from somewhere!  Now I suppose you could argue that some folks have the ability to trade with people over in Mexico but if that's the case, why wouldn't you just FLEE THIS HELLSCAPE AND ESCAPE TO MEXICO?

*Where was Keanu's gaggle of women getting their shirts printed?  Aside from his pretty slick LSD operation, is The Dream also operating a print shop in the back?  Or did he get these special delivered to "the middle of the bad batch wasteland" from Custom Ink?  For all the women he seems to have impregnated there is a noticeable lack of children other than Drogo's kid.  What is Keanu doing with all the babies?  Is he feeding them to white walkers?

Custom shirts, 2 for 1 discount

*Which criminals are determined undesirable and cast off into the bad batch wasteland?  Why is Arlen there?  I really feel like the answer to this would have given some amount of depth to her character.

*Is it possible to get more shots of the back of Arlen's shorts in this?

*How long did it take for some groups of people to become full-on cannibals and how long could I survive in a full-on cannibal desert wasteland?  I'm going to go with just a handful of minutes.

*Why do Arlen and Drogo fall in love with each other in the closing five minutes of this movie?  Why isn't she a little more upset that he ate one of her arms and legs?

*Why is skateboarding so popular here?  Was Tony Hawk one of the first people exiled to the desert?

A lot of questions.  Not so many answers.

Box Office Information: $180,000 domestic, and was only released in about 40 theaters on a $6 million budget.  Sometimes I don't know if the limited releases are intentional or not but these are not good numbers.  

Rotten Tomatoes: 47% Critic/30% Audience

IMDB: 5.3

My Movie Rating: 3.5/10.  This movie didn't HAVE TO BE THIS BAD.  It's slow and plodding and there's no reason I was forced to watch Arlen wander around in the desert high on LSD for what felt like 20 minutes.  Get a better editor and maybe add in a few rewrites and this MAYBE could have been somewhat entertaining.  As is though, this thing is a dud.

Keanu Rating: 7/10.  He's not really in this a whole lot but then nobody really is aside from Suki Waterhouse as Arlen, but he's pretty fun as a cult leader and is certainly one of the better parts of the movie.

Up Next: It's a movie called "To the Bone," and nope, I don't know what this is either.  If there's one thing I know by now, it's that this is not a good omen.