Dave Bautista shouldn’t have to lower himself to ‘In the Lost Lands’

Both visually and narratively incomprehensible, the post-apocalyptic action movie functions as a vehicle for wrestler-turned-serious-actor Dave Bautista, who unfortunately finds himself in exactly the wrong kind of film for someone who wants to be regarded with respect (he recently claimed to want to play Ernest Hemmingway; he’d be good at it, too). Of course, everyone has to pay the bills somehow, but Bautista’s soft-spoken introspections—which work wonders in the recent late-career Pamela Anderson drama The Last Showgirl—are entirely wrong for material that practically demands superficiality. Bautista’s role, of wasteland gunslinger Boyce, would be a much better fit for a direct-to-video action star like Steven Segal. The former WWE Champion isn’t just too good for In the Lost Lands, but the material actively works against him, given how seldomly Anderson is capable of training his camera on subtext or inner life.

Written by Constantin Werner, from a story treatment by Werner and Anderson, the film is about—gosh, where to begin?—a nebulously powered, heavily tattooed witch, Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich), hunted by a Christofascist regime ruling over the eponymous Lost Lands. It’s a dilapidated desert realm where you can just about make out the ruins of buildings and human society, but only enormous, steel-beam crucifixes still stand tall. It’s the kind of design that speaks to modern anxieties around encroaching Evangelical overreach in the United States, and it would arguably be effective if you could ever see what the hell was happening on screen. Anderson’s characters, his handful of practical foreground elements, and his gaudy digital backgrounds all seem to blend together, and neither the action nor the more straightforward dialogue scenes have a sense of spatial geography.

Milla Jovovich as Gray Alys in "In the Lost Lands."

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This makes tracking both the plot and the relationships a difficult task. The story follows Alys agreeing to grant a wish to the realm’s duplicitous queen, Lady Melange (Amara Okereke)—thank you, Frank Herbert—who wants to acquire the powers of a werewolf. However, for reasons initially unknown, the queen’s advisor Jerais (Simon Lööf) wishes for Alys to fail in her task, knowing full well that—for reasons also unexplained—she decides to grant everyone’s wish, no matter what. If that sounds like a paradox, it’s something Martin’s short story confronts in the form of a tongue-in-cheek morality play along the lines of The Monkey’s Paw. However, in Anderson’s film, it feels more like a gaping plot hole (one of several, mind you) that unravels in the form of a baffling, meaningless plot twist.

In order to acquire said powers for Melande, Alys must travel through dangerous, sprawling wilderness resembling a half-rendered Mad Max video game in order to find one such werewolf, a task for which she enlists the help of Bautista’s mercenary. While Boyce has the stature of an imposing action hero (Bautista is built like a fire hydrant, after all), anything suave or alluring about him begins and ends at his low-brimmed cowboy hat, the two-headed snake he carries for a couple of scenes, and the secret pistols he whips out of his sleeves exactly once. Bautista is more than capable of bringing pathos to genre archetypes—take, for instance, his haunted soldier in Zack Snyder’s zombie action movie Army of the Dead—but for him to do so, the film in question must have some semblance of substance to begin with. Instead, any attempts he makes to craft a vulnerable persona come off as a deviation from Anderson’s accidental pastiche; that Bautista is the only one who appears to be trying makes him stick out sorely. On the other hand, Jovovich—as Anderson’s long-time partner and collaborator—knows how to deliver the right kind of medium-flame intensity for this sort of screensaver dreck.

Milla Jovovich as Gray Alys and Dave Bautista as Boyce in "In the Lost Lands."

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As the duo lurches from one non-descript location to the next—each barely visible to the eye, and with a plot reasoning indecipherable to the brain—there are at least a small handful of ideas that seem worthwhile. They fight skeletal demons at one point. And for much of the runtime, the shining skulls strewn across the costumes and dwellings of the film’s pious, conservative Christian zealots resemble Death Metal album covers, two societal forces traditionally at odds. Of course, nothing comes of this thematic clash, but it’s noticeable nonetheless, and one of the few things your eyes might latch onto when they aren’t glazing over with boredom.

As for its lead performers, they have a negative amount of physical and emotional chemistry, as though a self-serious method actor had been cast opposite Bond girl, and neither could decide on how to approach their scenes. When it turns out they were meant to have had romantic tension all along, it plays almost like a jump scare. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there could have been any solution to this problem, short of demanding Bautista transform into an entirely different (and far less talented) kind of actor. And yet, his lack of shiny, movie star charisma does, in fact, hurt the already terrible In the Lost Lands, if only because he’s too thoughtful an artist to truly lower himself to the level of something so cheap and disposable.