In the Lost Lands
review by Bobby Blakey
Director Paul W.S. Anderson has an impressive resume of genre films to his name including Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, Alien vs. Predator, Monster Hunter and numerous films in the Resident Evil franchise. Now he is reteaming with his Resident Evil star and real-life wife Milla Jovovich for his latest film In The Lost Lands co-starring Dave Bautista based on a short story from Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin. Could this film bring a new world worth getting invested in or will it fail to cast a spell on audiences?
In The Lost Lands follows a Queen who sends the powerful and feared sorceress Gray Alys to the ghostly wilderness of the Lost Lands in search of a magical power, where the sorceress and her guide, the drifter Boyce, must outwit and outfight man and demon.
I know that the films of Anderson are hit and miss with most people, but I admit that I am a fan of most of them. When I heard he was working with this cast on material from Martin it seemed like the recipe for success until I saw the trailer. The look of the film which looked to be completely green screened gave off vibes of Sucker Punch and 300 wrapped in an Asylum films budget, but maybe the trailer was not doing it justice right? Sadly, it didn’t get much better in the finished product.
Before getting into the visual issues the film itself does have what should have been a compelling and interesting story but just never delivers. The film felt like it tried to force feed the narrative that was barely there to audiences that they felt might be too dumb to understand it. A lot of it could have been told in smaller ways and the dialogue cleaned up to make something fans would have loved, but it wasn’t to be.
Bautista does a fine job and is trying his best to really bring this cowboy like
drifter to life, but just not given much to work with. Jovovich, who is a stable lead in Anderson’s films, felt more like she was just walking the motions since her character despite being the lead and fighting for whatever they are doing just never seemed to care all that much. I think this whole thing might have worked better as a series as it brought an overstuffed number of characters that is par for the course with R. R. Martin’s writings, but here just gets to be too much without much purpose.
The action here is fine when it happens, but never really anything that stands out like it could have. There are a couple cool sequences, but the overuse of CGI and slow motion gets old fast, feeling more like they are just trying to convince us how cool it is as opposed to actually being cool. The rest of the film is just slow and dull, most of the time it’s hard to get invested even when they bring in some interesting twists and turns to the story that should have had bigger punch.
The CGI itself is better than the trailer but never looks like much more than a decent video game. Some of the mashups between the CGI and real-world characters is just silly looking and makes the moments that do work less effective overall. I so wanted to be wrong and come out loving this film, but sadly it just doesn’t do anything more than fill space. Maybe it will find the audience it is looking for, but don’t think it will find the franchise it hoped for.
Decide for yourself if you dare and check out In the Lost Lands in theaters now from Vertical Entertainment.