Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey, & Jason Momoa Star in This Cannibal Thriller

Ana Lily Amirpour is like an avant-garde chef, continuously experimenting with each creation by throwing so many disparate elements into one pot and seeing what goes together. Her debut film, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, was a vampire tale that combined Jean-Luc Godard coolness with Francis Ford Coppola formal control. Her most recent film, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, was a raucous New Orleans one-crazy-night romp that took the ’80s buddy film formula and injected it with superpowers and a feel for street-level grime in league with the Safdie Brothers and Sean Baker. In between those two films is arguably the weirdest film of her career, the completely insane concoction that is The Bad Batch, taking a page from the vast annals of post-apocalypse art and acid Westerns, while mixing it with a pure star power that keeps the audience on its toes.

What Is ‘The Bad Batch’ About?

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All in all, that’s a pretty wacky combination. We’ve got cannibalism, a destroyed and rebuilt society, and cults. Did I forget to mention the amount of star power, which makes absolutely no sense? We’ve got Momoa in full shirtless warrior glory, we have Keanu channeling his inner guru in a way that recalls prior roles in films like Thumbsucker, and Jim Carrey wandering in and out of the film with nary any recognition or shred of why you’d typically cast him in the first place. Oh, and let’s throw in cameos from Giovanni Ribisi, as an irritating layabout who rambles about the “one thing” you must never forget, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him appearance by Diego Luna as the DJ of Comfort. What’s most jarring about it is that, except for Keanu, none of the casting is angled in a way that asks you to recall the actor’s previous work and view this role as a shift in the context of their career. Momoa hadn’t really established the star persona he has now by the time of this film, and his role has very little Aquaman energy to it. Meanwhile, Carrey’s inclusion is downright baffling, as you barely recognize him for most of the runtime, and his character serves as little more than a plot device and sideshow distraction, with only a smattering of his signature Mr. Fantastic bodily magic that he’s effortlessly worked for decades.

It’s a shame that Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves don’t share any scenes together, as it would have given us a bizarre preview of their eventual dynamic that nobody saw coming in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. That said, those looking for any sign of Carrey’s rubber man buffoonery or Reeves’ edgy ice-cold killer energy that makes their Sonic dynamic so fun will be sorely disappointed. Carrey reaches all the way back to the days of the silent Vaudeville clowns for his performance as a stand-offish and mysterious mute man who roams the land and knows far more than he lets on.

Jason Momoa Is ‘The Bad Batch’s Standout

Jason Momoa as Miami Man in the desert with Suki Waterhouse's Arlen — Image via Neon

Of this trinity of surprising casting choices, it’s Jason Momoa who stands out the most, primarily due to how much time he gets. It took Momoa a while to build his own strengths as an actor, but he’s since graduated from stoic brutes that express all their emotions in their eyebrows. Miami Man is still an absolute unit who can terrify anyone into submission, but Momoa adds an air of genuine menace that he hadn’t harnessed before. It’s one thing to convince us that he can beat someone up, but it’s another to convince us that he’ll literally eat someone without seeming deranged. Add in the dimension of how much he genuinely loves his daughter and shows warmth and tenderness, and it points to Momoa reaching a new height in his career where he can become more than his muscles and amazing hair.

‘The Bad Batch’ Is Unconcerned With Expectations or Momentum

Jason Momoa, Suki Waterhouse, and Keanu Reeves in promotional art for The Bad Batch — Image via Neon

It’s more than plausible if I described for you the setting and subject of this film (you know, cannibalism and cults in a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland), you would picture a Mad Max story that George Miller had discarded as too depressing. But instead, the film is far less enamored with the unsavory survivalist elements and more fixated on marinating in the moments where people try to be comfortable in the face of an unpromising future. While there is still human carnage and a feeling of hopelessness, the number of scenes that are devoted to having drug visions and stretching moments of silence and interpersonal tension drifts into meandering territory. It feels like The Bad Batch had about 90 minutes of story and stretched them to 120 minutes just by having the characters vibe with each other, becoming fixtures of a series of music videos. Think Cormac McCarthy stories by way of Alejandro Jodorowsky Westerns like El Topo, or the explosion of late 1960s films devoted to exploring the effects of drugs, like The Trip. It’s a movie that your enjoyment of will depend entirely on whether you’re on its wavelength, and if you just so happen to be on some kind of psychotropic drug while watching, then all the better.

This isn’t to say that the film has no sense of conventional narrative structure or tension. Arlen is still built up to be a protagonist to get behind, one just looking for security and willing to fight against those that threaten her. Time is taken to develop a connection between her and Honey, though it’s one built less on understanding each other and more on the basic need to protect a child from the dangers of the world. Even characters like Miami Man and the Dream, who are ostensibly antagonists, get moments that humanize them, like Miami Man sharing his story of emigrating from Cuba or the Dream sharing his philosophy about treating animals with respect. But the outline of the plot mechanics could be scribbled on a napkin, and it’s hard to feel too much suspense when the film is more concerned with devoting another three-minute montage to its next needle drop (though, it must be said, the music choices are incredible). That devotion to musical moments leads to some of the film’s best moments, like Miami Man killing a woman for food while Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” plays on his headphones or a montage of perfectly sculpted bodybuilder cannibals pumping iron to the tune of Die Antwoord‘s “Fish Paste.” It’s those moments where Amirpour’s stamp is most pronounced, fusing different strands of pop culture to form a distorted picture of Americana.