THE BAD BATCH (2017)

How many times have we heard this one? A hotshot indy auteur impresses critics with a modestly budgeted yet creatively audacious picture that becomes a sort of sleeper hit. Some studio throws money at the auteur for a more ambitious project, perhaps equally audacious, that bombs. Playing the familiar role of the auteur is Ana Lily Amirpour, whose sleeper success was the Farsi-language dystopian vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The admirable Megan Ellison of Annapurna Pictures backed Amirpour's new English-language project and no doubt helped her hire name actors, including that new embodiment of indy edginess -- I'm not kidding, either! -- Keanu Reeves. It might tell you something about the character of the project that Jim Carrey, of all people, was cast as a mute. It's really one of his better performances.

What remains from A Girl Walks Home, along with skateboards, is an arid dystopian environment, now located somewhere in the neighborhood of Texas. At an unspecified near-future time the place is a dumping ground for all sorts of undesirables who are known collectively as the Bad Batch. It's never quite clear how Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) qualifies, but we follow her into this bad new world, where she's promptly captured by cannibals who live in a vast auto graveyard/trailer park. The cannibals aren't greedy; they butcher Arlen one limb at a time, but once she's down to one arm and one leg she tires of her new role and perpetrates an improbable escape.

She ends up in the relatively civilized colony of Comfort, where she acquires a prosthetic leg, but encounters more cannibals while exploring a vast dump. Killing one, Arlen inherits her(?) child, whom she takes to Comfort. The girl is lured into the household of the apparent ruler or guru of the place (Reeves) while Arlen wanders back into the desert on a drug trip, drugs being the principal cuisine of Comfort. Meanwhile, the girl's father(?), a tattooed Cuban cannibal sketch artist (Jason Momoa), hunts for the child. Finding Arlen, who denies known the her, he demands nonetheless that she return to Comfort and retrieve the girl. Why he can't go in himself remains unclear, but the point becomes moot when one of the many marauders riding around shoots the Cuban and brings Arlen to Comfort on his own initiative.

Finding the girl in the guru's entourage, Arlen insinuates herself into his presence. "The Dream" has a harem of gun-toting women, many of whom are pregnant by him. Comfort is his garden; he feeds it, he says, so it will feed him. Whatever he means by this -- simply that he reaps the benefit of their servitude or that he eats the babies -- it repels Arlen, who has smuggled a gun into his compound inside her prosthetic foot and uses it to take a hostage first, and then the Cuban's little girl. Back in the desert, she reunites with the Cuban, who's recovered with help from Carrey's hermit, and resolves to stay with him and his daughter.

Let me cut to the chase and call The Bad Batch Amirpour's Brave New World. In the end, Arlen chooses savage liberty over somatic subjugation in Comfort. The freedom she chooses will come at a more terrible price than most people in the movie audience could imagine paying -- symbolized at the end when the Cuban slaughters his daughter's pet bunny to satisfy her Comfort-cultivated appetite -- but wouldn't anything be preferable to life under Keanu Reeves' thumb, or some other body part of his? Whether we're to understand that Arlen has made the right choice, or simply the best of bad choices, is, like much of Amirpour's dystopia, unclear. What's clear enough is that submission for the sake of small-c comfort is not an option, and probably never was for many in the Bad Batch, or else they wouldn't be part of that group in the first place. What's significantly missing is the other option, the world from which Arlen and the others have been exiled, that has designated them misfits. By what standard? Are all the Bad Batch people really misfits, or has mainstream society judged them unfairly? We don't know enough about the dystopia as a whole to judge whether Arlen presumably adopting a predatory lifestyle as the Cuban's consort can be left as an acceptable outcome or whether that outcome defines The Bad Batch as a horror film. It's not a horrible film, at least. Amirpour has a good directorial eye, strongly enhanced by Lyle Vincent's cinematography, and on some level the very limited range of options she leaves her characters is to the film's credit. On the other hand, Arlen is never much more than a cypher, unoriginal even in her mutilation (see also Charlie Theron in Mad Max:Fury Road and Rose McGowan in Planet Terror), while Jason Momoa is what he is: someone who looks like he should be a fascinating badass, if not a fantasy book cover come to life, yet invariably a charisma vacuum. If the name means anything to you, think of him as the Roman Reigns of actors. This is actually one of his better performances, but he's still more sculpture than actor, and that hurts a movie that wants to present his character, in all his viciousness, as possibly the most human being of the Bad Batch. Of course, a dystopian story doesn't really require very well-rounded characters, so the limitations of Momoa and Waterhouse aren't fatal to the film. Overall I think it was a worthwhile endeavor that will, with luck, prove a useful experience for Amirpour as she moves on to better projects, as long as she isn't exiled to some cinematic Bad Batch for this sophomore stumble.