I love bad movies — movies made with such lack of skill, guile, or just basic filmmaking talent that what you’re watching becomes feverishly entertaining in spite of itself. With a few friends and maybe 10-14 beverages, the film transcends its own limitations and achieves something only the very best schlock ever really accomplishes: it becomes eternal. Look at movies like The Room, The Wicker Man, Birdemic, Troll 2, and a smattering of other cult classics to really see how wildly entertaining truly awful movies can be.
Paul W.S. Anderson is the reigning king of directing mid-budget trash. His movies are so terrible and so entertaining at the same time that I catch everything he makes, opening weekend, just in case he accidentally knocks out another cult classic. Over his three-decade career, Anderson has made a British nihilist neo-noir with $hopping, the sci-fi horror cult classic Event Horizon, Alien vs. Predator, the goofiest Mortal Kombat movie, the hilariously self-serious Kurt Russell action movie Soldier, Jason Statham’s Death Race, Jon Snow’s Pompeii, and seven movies with his wife, the great Milla Jovovich, including four Resident Evils, The Three Musketeers, Monster Hunter, and his new magnum opus, In the Lost Lands.
To this day, Event Horizon and the OG Resident Evil are movies that I unapologetically and unironically love. I genuinely want Anderson to find that perfect symbiosis again of a bonkers script and high octane filmmaking that actually congeals into something great (or at least insanely entertaining) — movies we can laugh with and not at all. In the Lost Lands is not that movie.
As much as I love Jovovich and, more or less, the Resident Evil franchise, it’s hard not to feel like she’s slumming in Anderson’s movies. While her character, Alice, in the R.E. movies is super iconic, her character Alys (pronounced like Alice… good work writers) in In the Lost Lands is immediately forgettable. Her full name is Gray Alys and she’s a witch in a post-apocalyptic America who teams up with a tracker named Boyce (played by the never worse Dave Bautista) after she’s hired by the Queen (?) to find her the ability to change into a werewolf.
Yes, that’s actually the story, which is insane and fun. I’m on board for Jovovich and Baustista (primarily on horseback) hunting a werewolf across the ruinous wasteland of an America filled with, I kid you not, demons, ghouls, two-headed snakes, a psychotic religious order, and some straight-up magic right out of Final Fantasy. But, as is the case with most of the oeuvre of P.W.S.A., the description is way more fun than the movie itself.
Also, I’m not sure there is a single real set in the entire film. The color grading is so over-saturated you can visualize the panicking cinematographer and special effects team compensating for a budget that does not equal the director’s vision. Anderson is trying to make a post-apocalyptic western here. He wants endless vistas of crumbled ruins with the moonlit silhouettes of Jovovich and Bautista creating instantly appealing iconography. Instead, viewers get underlit and muddy sequences of two deeply talented and palpably struggling performers emoting in front of almost entirely computer-generated backgrounds that look like they were pulled directly from a decade-old video game.
Based on a short story by George R.R. Martin, I’m not sure what I really expected from In the Lost Lands. I love Bautista and Jovovich and figured they would elevate whatever ridiculousness Anderson created, but they just look lost, confused and a little pissed off. I know Bautista is trying to transition into being taken more seriously as an actor and I really hope this role doesn’t set him back. He carries so much soul in his voice and pain in his eyes that whenever he’s given a piece of dialogue like “That bitch killed my snake,” he just seems depressed.
Jovovich needs to sit down with Anderson and have a real discussion about what he wants to achieve as a filmmaker. Make no mistake, this movie is going to flop, miserably. The only other person in the auditorium during this showing was a theater employee (and I’m not even sure if he was awake). I know Jovovich is Anderson’s muse, but he needs to craft something worthy of her talent and screen presence. He’s letting her down and, as a diehard fan of Jovovich he’s letting me down, too.
Anderson has to find his passion again. Either he needs to seek out a story that truly inspires him or find a budget that allows him to achieve his goofy vision without compromise. The concept of a post-apocalyptic spaghetti western is a solid one and a badass movie can surely be made in that specific genre. This ain’t it. Not even close. As much as I love a bad movie, this is just too much. You broke me, Anderson.
Grade: F
