Land Of Bad review: Liam Hemsworth goes to war while Russell Crowe goes to the store

It’s a customary cliché to say that certain actors are so compelling, a viewer might pay to watch them read the phone book. Land Of Bad, despite its hilariously simplistic title, isn’t quite that on the nose, but it does feature an extended sequence of cutaways to Russell Crowe … doing his grocery shopping. And damned if it isn’t some of the most compelling stuff he’s done in ages. Nothing crazy happens; no punches are thrown, no stacks of tins are scattered. The closest thing to a joke is Crowe standing in front of a sign that reads “dry aged meat.” It’s just Crowe in a grocery store, buying things, checking his list, and doing that stuff we all do. Somehow, it’s riveting.

Incidentally, the rest of the movie is about war in the Philippines.

There’s every possibility that all involved might have wanted to call the movie World Of Shit, to coin a military phrase, but settled on a more PG version. It’s what Liam Hemsworth’s airman “Playboy” Kinney finds himself in after a rescue mission goes severely sideways, and he’s left to fend for himself in a jungle full of people shooting at him. All he can rely on is a drone, piloted remotely by Las Vegas-based Crowe as Captain Grimm “Reaper,” armed with three missiles, like limited power-ups in a video game.

Though it’s ostensibly based on a real incident, which happened in Afghanistan rather than Southeast Asia, Land Of Bad feels like a throwback to the type of B-movies Chuck Norris regularly cranked out in the ’80s, like Missing In Action. Vietnam, often manipulated by evil Soviets, was the movie battlefield of choice then; now, it’s still numerous nameless Asian people getting killed by the blue-eyed hero, as they serve a higher puppet master, in this case a Yemeni terrorist. The racial optics are terrible, just like they are in most actual wars, and the script clearly feels obliged to throw in a few “We can’t be racist because …” moments as a counterweight, like Reaper’s bond with his Black female coworker, or the POW that Playboy hopes to save turning out to be the lone Asian-American soldier seen onscreen.

In one location, Hemsworth is hiding behind trees, falling down hills, and trying not to get shot; in another, Crowe is goofing around at a Las Vegas military facility in a Hawaiian shirt, getting cranky about Keurig coffee pots, bitching about the phone ringer being off, and worrying about his fourth wife becoming pregnant and her vegan dietary demands. If it seems weirder that he’s in the military at his age and shape than it did that he was a Pope’s Italian exorcist last year, well, the movie does halfway explain that. Never, however, is it suggested that he’s especially great at his job. So when other officers pull rank and threaten to take over the mission, there’s not a lot of tension there. For once in a military movie about mavericky types, it seems like the officers could do just as well at the task as the wacky loner.

The action scenes almost get boring initially. Once Playboy is alone, well, it’s not like they’re going to kill him off, so where’s the drama? Fortunately for us, but not for him, the mission takes a dramatically worse turn about halfway through, with more people involved and the stakes getting much higher. By the time he’s running through an underground base in his underwear, there’s little doubt this movie knows what it is, and it ain’t any kind of “true story.”

Thanks to dark filters and camerawork that mixes handheld, drones, and steady shots, this never feels as cheap as some of the ’80s movies it emulates. It’s shot mostly in Australia, but not the parts that look like the outback desert we’re so familiar with from other films. The location scouts earned their keep, with a bad guy base that looks expensive, and like it’s really being blown up.

Director William Eubank, whose previous films include The Signal (2014) and Underwater, seems to be settling into a groove as a capable B-movie guy. It’s worth noting that executive producer Jared Purrington has worked as a storyboard artist or illustrator on every Zack Snyder movie since Man Of Steel; Eubank doesn’t use much slo-mo, but the directors seem like they would be kindred spirits. The major difference is that Eubank does seem to be in on his own joke, which is crucial—Land Of Bad might be quite offensive if it were possible to take it seriously. It’s still hard to recommend, exactly, but if you can get through a rough first act, you’ll see both absurd military superheroics and the greatest grocery run ever. Forty years ago, it might have even started a franchise.