In the Lost Lands
There's a moment, perhaps 80-minutes into the film, where our protagonists battle cursed skeleton warriors inside a hollowed-out nuclear reactor which provides the only momentary thrill of an otherwise dreadful adaptation of a George R. R. Martin short story featuring a witch (Milla Jovovich) with pulsating eyeballs and a hunter (Dave Bautista) traveling through a dystopian desert in search of a werewolf. Filmed on a modest budget for large-scale sci-fi/horror, In the Lost Lands earned back one-ninth of the film's cost. The term is often overused nowadays, but this is what a true flop looks like. It did no better with critics than audiences with its hackneyed storytelling and half-developed concepts finding little to no support.
The latest from husband-wife team of Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich, who continue to subsidize each others careers through a variety of questionable genre movies, is a complete disaster from beginning to end. Jovovich stars as a witch who can't refuse a job from any paying customer (even when it conflicts with an earlier agreed-upon arrangement). Hired by a Queen (Amara Okereke) in danger of losing her thrown to religious zealots, our witch goes in search of a werewolf whose powers the Queen desperately wants for her own. Bautista is slumming it here as the hunter our witch hires to get her through the Lost Lands and track down the wolf.
The plot is a convoluted mess of oaths, deals, politics, religion, deceptions, class warfare, late twists, and monsters (but far less than you would expect), all wrapped in silly trappings of a surprisingly bland dystopian world which provides shockingly few seconds of fun. It's also a chase movie with our an army of religious soldiers sent out after the heretic witch until everyone grows weary of that subplot and it is literally thrown off a cliff. Even with most of the film's budget going to effects, and the scenery being little more than ruins and junk-filled factories, it still finds a way to look like cheap cutscenes thrown together. The rules of the world, and its magic, are ill-defined. And the slog towards the climax is borderline torture. This is desolate indeed.
- Title: In the Lost Lands
- IMDb: link
