Land of Bad

When a Delta Force team is ambushed in enemy territory, their rookie JTAC officer ends up on the run, hunted by hostile forces. Their only hope lies with the veteran Air Force drone pilot acting as their eyes in the sky during a brutal 48-hour battle for survival.

The opening of the movie Land of Bad is pretty typical when it comes to one of these “realistic portrayals of the military” action movies, a black screen and a few lines of sober text describing some grim reality American soldiers must deal with somewhere across the globe. This time, the lines of text inform us that the Sulu Sea—a body of water located between the Philippines, Brunei, and Indonesia—is home to some of the most violent extremist groups in Southern Asia, and that the various Intelligence Agencies around the world work together to support the soldiers on the ground who put their lives on the line there every day. It ends by saying that we are at war (meaning in the Sulu Sea), but we just don’t know it.

First off, I think that last sentence would’ve landed better if it had said: “we are ALREADY at war, we just don’t know it YET.” But it didn’t, so I guess I just have to sit with that small annoyance forever…

So, the story basically goes like this…

A delta team is being inserted into the Philippines jungle with orders to quietly extract a CIA asset who has been captured by the leader of the Abu Sayyaf militia. The delta team are your pretty typical collection of bad ass professional military operator action movie templates: The steely-eyed and taciturn former-college-boy-looking Master Sergeant with a barely hidden big heart, who's named John “Sugar” Sweet, the gruff mohawked Sergeant Bishop, who has “Land of Bad” tattooed on his forearms, which he holds up and displays while saying “Welcome to the Land of Bad!” as they're standing in the jungle, because fuck subtlety, and finally, there's the friendly zen hippy/surfer guy Sergeant Abell, who has a wife and kids waiting for him back home, so he's obviously going to be the first to die.

Then, due to the bad luck of happening to be on base at the wrong time when the delta team needs a new JTAC officer, Air Force Sergeant J.J. “Playboy” Kinney is temporarily assigned to the delta team. J.J. is an All-American boy, but he’s also a bit untested, and this mission will be one of his first times in the field. JTAC means Joint Terminal Attack Controller. It’s J.J.’s job to be the guy on the ground who directs the close air support military aircraft, including drone aircraft, where to strike and when.

The guy actually piloting the drone is Captain Eddie "Reaper" Grimm, a crotchety old Air Force officer who has trouble with authority, especially his little mustache-wearing, college-basketball-obsessed Colonel. Eddie‘s stick-time is supported by the soon-to-be-married Staff Sergeant Nia Branson. Stationed half way around the world from the Philippines in Las Vegas, Nevada, they are obviously good friends, as well as a well-oiled machine in the drone command center.

Eddie’s third wife is about to have a baby. He’s waiting for the big call, and he’s angry at the rest of the unit, because they keep taking the unit phone off the hook so they won’t be bothered during the big game. Nia meanwhile is looking for the right moment to ask Eddie something, and it’s pretty clear from the start that she wants to ask him to walk her down the aisle.

But all of this regular life stuff is interrupted when the mission in the Philippines goes pear-shaped… big time.

A firefight erupts, the delta team is seemingly wiped out, and J.J. has to walk out of a war zone with the entire local militia hunting him, with only Eddie’s voice in his ear, and his eye in the sky in the drone overhead, to guide him to safety. This is the beginning of a 48 hour gauntlet of gunfire, explosions, and male bonding.

Land of Bad excels during its myriad intense and admittedly pretty awesome action scenes, and it stumbles whenever its various archetype characters attempt to add a third dimension to themselves. The character “arcs” are all pretty obvious from the start, as are their various fates, and it all wraps up neat and tidy at the end. What I’m saying is that there’s no real surprises here, it's mostly a pretty good fireworks show that loses any semblance of narrative coherence in the third act, but still... nice fireworks. I will say that the stark contrast between the life of the soldiers waging war through the wonders of technology, and the life of the soldiers waging war in the old fashioned way is pretty interesting to see, and it’s probably the closest the film actually gets to being an accurate portrayal of military life.

The film is best when it‘s jumping back and forth between Eddie and Nia working the various problems, and J.J. and the delta soldiers duking it out with the militia in a simultaneous action extravaganza, even if it's ridiculously heavy-handed when it comes to making sure that we understand clearly that these local brown guys are all super evil, and thus, deserve to be sent to hell in a burst of holy American fire. But the film gets a lot less cool whenever it dives headlong into it's seeming point, which is a pandering lecture about exactly what’s wrong with our modern-day American military, especially as the answer seems to be that some of the people in our armed forces are simply not focused enough on killing.

But also, in the film’s defense, at one point Sgt. John “Sugar” Sweet kills a bad guy with a dinner plate, so… that was pretty cool.

If you're looking for a film that revels in its use of military terminology and its “accurate” depictions of military life and missions, all while showcasing the destructive might of the armed forces, with a bunch of guys shouting shit like “Fox 2!“ right before setting off a whole bunch of explosions, all of which is topped off with some bros signaling their new found respect for one another with a curt sharply raised chin nod… then, oh boy, do I have a movie for you, brother.

If not, then... meh.