There's a kernel of an interesting idea lurking in director/co-writer William Eubank's military thriller Land of Bad, about the modern disconnect from the consequences of warfare, but it's so poorly realized and buried under jingoistic action that it might as well not be there at all. If Eubank and co-writer David Frigerio have anything critical to say about how the U.S. military conducts covert operations on foreign soil, they're too fixated on propping up their one-dimensional heroes for it to come across.
The story may be simplistic and derivative, but at least Eubank delivers some solid action along the way. Land of Bad is divided between two locations, and at times it feels like two separate movies. Somewhere in the Philippines, inexperienced Air Force Sgt. JJ Kinney (Liam Hemsworth) is recruited by Delta Force Master Sgt. John "Sugar" Sweet (Milo Ventimiglia) to serve as the team's Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) officer, in the absence of any other available personnel. That means that Kinney is responsible for communicating with drone pilot Eddie "Reaper" Grimm (Russell Crowe), who's thousands of miles away on an Air Force base outside Las Vegas.
Hemsworth and Crowe never appear on screen together, and while their characters are meant to form a bond, the personal details they share are sketchy. Reaper, working comfortably from what is essentially an office building, gets more time for human interaction, although a subplot about him awaiting the birth of his latest child goes nowhere, other than to belabor tiresome jokes about his wife's veganism. A late-film sequence cross-cutting between Reaper's grocery shopping and Kinney's mortal peril comes off as crass rather than sophisticated. Crowe brings a sense of weary honor to the role of an Air Force lifer who bucked authority too often to get promoted, and a movie exploring his position in a desk job with potentially deadly consequences could bring a different perspective to the typical war story.
That's not what Land of Bad is, though, and the main focus remains in the Philippines, where Kinney's team is ambushed as they attempt to rescue an American intelligence asset from a terrorist compound. Left to fend for himself, Kinney has to make it to an extraction point while taking out hordes of faceless enemies, with Reaper as his guide. Although Land of Bad isn't based on a true story, it has the tone of self-consciously patriotic real-life thrillers like American Sniper or Lone Survivor, with the same level of simplistic hero worship.
Every early interaction between Kinney and his teammates (including one played by Hemsworth's brother Luke) emphasizes his youth and naïveté, but as soon as he finds himself under enemy fire, he turns into a nearly invincible warrior. He's initially presented like the Rambo of the downbeat, understated First Blood, but then he conducts himself like the bombastic Rambo of the later sequels. By the climax, Eubank has found a reason for Hemsworth to fight off bad guys while shirtless.
Those fights can still be exciting, and even if he's working in the realm of action-movie clichés — including a stereotypical Middle Eastern terrorist villain — Eubank knows how to make the most of those clichés. He evokes first-person shooter video games with occasional POV shots looking over the barrel of a gun, and he deploys a literal ticking clock for manufactured suspense in the finale.
That's the stuff of anonymous direct-to-video movies, and Land of Bad often feels like it escaped into theaters from the Redbox where it belongs. It's a mediocre B-movie grasping at unearned military honor to seem more meaningful than it really is.
LAND OF BAD
