Parents' Guide to Land of Bad

Often quite exciting yet slightly problematic and certainly too long, this bloody military action movie squeaks by on the strength of Russell Crowe's scene-stealing performance. Land of Bad has a little trouble getting the inexperienced Kinney in on the mission—no one seems able to answer the basic question of "what is he doing here?"—but once he's there, he proves capable of handling things. The jungle scenes offer a good mix of soldier-type banter, close calls, and suspense-building. The trouble arises when the movie posits its thesis: that war is only "worth" anything if it's fought man-to-man, and that technology—especially drones—isn't authentic and offers no glory.

Sure enough, during the climax, Kinney finds himself fighting one-on-one, and it's hard not to wonder what the agenda is here. But when Crowe storms on-screen, first complaining about the location of his coffee in the kitchen and raging about his March Madness team and then firing off pages of dialogue about his ex-wives and current (vegan) wife, drinking Monster drinks and practicing golf shots, things get a spark. A lot of it is extraneous, but it adds a much needed level of liveliness to the proceedings. It all leads up to a climax with Kinney trying to escape the villains' compound before a bomb drops, cross-cut with Reaper at the supermarket, trying to get everything on his wife's shopping list. Weirdly, it works. Land of Bad has its fair share of "bad," but it's mostly outweighed by the good.