Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Land of Bad’ on Netflix, a Military Actioner Starring Russell Crowe and Liam Hemsworth

This week in The Curious Case of Russell Crowe ’s Late Career is Land of Bad (now streaming on Netflix), in which the one-time Oscar winner half-anchors a hoo-rah military action-thriller that’s just barely above the direct-to-video tier. And that tier is where Crowe has resided for a few years now, not quite at the Nicolas Cage I’ll-star-in-anything level, but right about where Liam Neeson has been since Taken became a low-budget/high-yield hit. Crowe co-stars with both Lesser Hemsworths, although Liam eventually takes the lead as a greenhorn Air Force special-ops-er (OPS, OPS, movies are always about the OPS) who finds himself in deep doo-doo behind enemy lines while Crowe’s character oversees the mission remotely. The movie seems destined to wedge itself in the Netflix Top 10 for a week, and unlike most of the random-ass generic movies that end up there, Land of Bad ain’t half bad.

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The Gist: Sgt. JJ “Playboy” Kinney (Liam Hemsworth) doesn’t know whether to eat Froot Loops or Lucky Charms. Master Sgt. John “Sugar” Sweet (Milo Ventimiglia) suggest Froot Loops, but I recommend neither: Does Playboy really need all that sugar prior to his first legit OPS mission? He’s probably already jittery. He piles into a helicopter with mission head Sugar, Sgt. Abell (Luke Hemsworth) and Sgt. Bishop (Ricky Whittle) – there’s always one guy named Bishop on these movie OPS missions, always with the Bishops – and their goal is to parachute into the Filipino jungle and rescue a CIA asset from Abu Sayyaf terrorists. Piece of cake! Until they find themselves in a world of shit, or a world of f—, or a world of piss, or a world of George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV. Take your pick. They’re all euphemisms for “land of bad,” which is where everything always ends up FUBAR.

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Overseeing the mission from a cozy office space in Las Vegas is Capt. Eddie Grimm (Crowe), or Reaper if you’re into the cutesy-nickname thing, working alongside Staff Sgt. Nia Branson (Chika Ikogwe). This is the type of movie where Nia wants to ask Reaper something and she keeps getting interrupted and we’re held in suspense until she finally finally finally gets to ask at the end of the movie. It’s also the kind of movie where the military jargon (“I need an updated ROE!”) is cut with cynical banter (“Y’ever shit your pants on an op?”) and earnest exhortations (“I’m gonna get you fixed up!”) to make it palatable and entertaining. Reaper gets the most character development, being a Big Guy in a Hawaiian Shirt whose fourth wife is pregnant and who’s pissed that Ohio State just ate dookie during March Madness, and IMPLORES the camo’d goofuses hooting at basketball in the TV lounge to keep the gosh darn phone on the hook in case his lady’s cervix continues to dilate. Lot goin’ on in Reaper’s life right now.

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Let’s break it down: Reaper controls the drone and he and Nia monitor the mission via satellite. Playboy’s job is to summon Reaper to launch missiles at whatever target needs to have the snot exploded out of it. The other three guys on the ground shoot and yell a lot. You just have to hope that Reaper doesn’t lose contact with the drone because, I dunno, the cat chewed through the modem cable? Which happens, of course. The lose-contact part, I’m not sure about the cat part. And of course, even though the faceless bad guys have all the aim of a Star Wars Stormtrooper with glaucoma, the mission goes straight to hell in a handbasket, leaving greenhorn Playboy alone on the ground, sometimes without COMMS back to Reaper, you always lose the COMMS in these types of movies. But then again, things always tend to work out in these types of movies. You can’t have Reaper crying into his headset back in Vegas while the bad guys laugh over Playboy’s corpse can you?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The two Extraction s did this stuff with more whiz-bang style (and a Greater Hemsworth). Stuff Peter Berg directs, like The Kingdom and Lone Survivor , comes to mind, as does Michael Bay’s most watchable/least popular movie, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi . Oh, and Behind Enemy Lines feels like a key reference point.

Performance Worth Watching: Crowe is very much in the pocket here, amping up the charisma for a character – if you read between the lines a little – whose life is probably pretty chaotic outside the military, but is absolutely committed to A) doing his job well and B) being a wiseass, in that order. Is it all as easy as Crowe makes it look? Probably not. But that’s a major part of the allure.

Memorable Dialogue: “It takes one shit day to change your whole perspective. That’s a fact.” – Sgt. Bishop, aka Capt. Foreshadowing, makes a prescient comment prior to the mission

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Shout out Land of Bad ’s music supervisor for selecting a meaty Bolt Thrower track to play in the background as our boys take tha choppah into enemy territory – bros know the greatest death metal band in civilized history when they hear it, and understand the songs’ war-is-hell themes fit with the movie’s war-is-hell themes. Only the most astute of music appreciators will notice such CRUCIAL DETAIL.

Anyway. Land of Bad isn’t totally Froot Loops, but our guy Playboy definitely got some Lucky Charms from this plot, which has some plausibility issues stemming from some real eyeroller coincidences. Not that we should care too much – director and co-writer William Eubank ( Underwater , Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin ) assures this is a well-executed by-the-numbers action-thriller from a rock-solid filmmaker who might be able to do something significant with a bigger budget someday.

Once the mission hits the ground and floors it right into a mountain of manure, the story cycles between tense, medium-to-heavily edited action and banter-ridden exchanges between Playboy and Reaper, spiced with the usual bear-down-let’s-GO mentality in the field and the usual procedural arguments back in the office. A sequence that cuts between Reaper nonchalantly grocery shopping and a fairly hairy torture sequence – yes, it involves PEEN HAMMERS – feels a little audacious in its dark humor, and Eubank indulges enough slo-mo violence with cartridges flying and sweaty dirty muscly men grimacing, and it sometimes gets oogy-fetishy enough to toss a layer of squick over any pacifists in the audience.

As for what the movie’s “about,” well, we get one throwaway exchange about drone tech taking the humanity out of warfare and separating one from the realities of life and death; Bishop thinks it’s bunk, Playboy thinks it saves lives, they’re both right, now let’s get on with the bullets and explosions and the righteous and selfless good guys killing the amoral bad guys. It might be a drag-and-a-half without Crowe, who gives the endeavor heaps of necessary color and comedy. He’s a slugger playing T-ball here, for sure, but we shouldn’t put him out to rent-a-star pasture yet.

Our Call: Land of Better Than We Expected . STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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