Somewhere in Italian born writer-director Francesco Lucente’s
third feature film Badland, a near three-hour spanning character study
of an Iraq war veteran who murders his wife and two sons before going on a
cross-country run from the law with his daughter, is a halfway decent film with
a singularly striking supporting performance from Terminator 2: Judgment Day
actor Joe Morton.
In theory, there’s
a compelling anti-war PTSD film lurking about in this gratuitously overlong
bloated thing. In practice, however, the
film written and directed as well as edited (now this is key) by the director
himself can’t seem to decide where or if to even bother trimming the excess
fat. Part of the filmmaking process is
being a good editor and knowing how to not lose your audience or use your time
wisely. But when you’re your own editor,
sometimes you fall too madly in love with your own creativity and don’t want to
junk anything at all. Such is the case
with Badland, a torpid Hallmark styled nihilistic punisher that asks us
to stick with as well as empathize with an irredeemable antagonist far longer
than any average filmgoer should be stuck with.
Jerry Rice (Jamie Draven, a poor man’s Sam Rockwell) is an
Iraq war veteran living in squalor in a junk yard shack presided over by his
embittered angry wife Nora (Vinessa Shaw from Eyes Wide Shut)
accompanied by his two young sons and daughter.
One night, he returns home while his wife is sleeping and discovers she’s
been hiding money from him. The next
day, he shoots her in the head at point blank range followed by his two sons
but he runs out of bullets before he can turn the gun on his daughter and them
himself.
His daughter Celina (Grace Currey
from the Shazam films) declares her undying devotion to her father under
the pretense, somehow, that her mother and two brothers will come back to life,
and they begin a cross-country odyssey from town to town looking to cover his
murderous tracks and start anew. Soon he
ends up at a lonely waitress’s coffee shop where he picks up work as a
cook. However, the reset button on his
life only lasts so long until the arrival of small town Sheriff Max Astin (Joe
Morton) who is grappling with his own postwar alcoholic demons before realizing
his new friend Jerry Rice isn’t who he appears to be.
Where it does work are the scenes with Joe Morton
who might as well be the film’s real heart and soul, a man broken by his
wartime experiences while still possessing just enough humanity to appeal to
whatever better natures Jerry Rice may or may not have left. If you trimmed out most of the surrounding
material and just zeroed in on the brief but tumultuous relationship between
Draven and Morton’s characters, you’d have a pretty compelling piece. As it stands, however, it meanders and drags its
feet past the point of losing our attention entirely.
--Andrew Kotwicki