Bad ‘Badlands’:
New AMC series is sort of a bad mashup of a handful of genres.
“Into the Badlands” is both the title of AMC’s new dramatic series and an apt description of the state of the network in the post-“Mad Men,” post “Breaking Bad” era.
The new six-episode series, premiering Sunday, Nov. 15, is kind of a mashup — and messup — of genres: martial arts, American Western, dystopian melodrama and … Tennessee Williams?
Created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, “Badlands” is loosely based on “Journey to the West,” one of the four great novels of classical Chinese literature. The Badlands are ruled by four feudal barons, and Sunny (Daniel Wu) is a
clipper in service to one of them, Quinn (Martin Csokas). A clipper is neither a barber or a pro basketball player but, rather, a coldhearted killing machine, and none is better than Sunny.
Speaking to a room full of clipper cadets, Quinn uses Sunny as a teaching aid, urging the boys to aspire to his level of murderous efficiency.
Among the clipper wannabes is a brooding young man named MK (Aramis Knight), who gets into a fight with another boy over an amulet he wears around his neck. MK is saved from taking a beating when Sunny intervenes. Sunny learns that MK is searching for his mother and the amulet is all he has left of his former life in another feudal realm. But it also turns out that MK has special powers that are only turned on in certain circumstances. Those powers make him a valuable asset to Quinn’s archrival baron, the Widow (Emily Beecham).
Life isn’t safe for MK in Quinn’s domain, so he hits the road, with Sunny’s help, and winds up getting saved from Quinn’s pursuing forces — led by his evil son Ryder (Oliver Stark) — by Tilda (Ally Ionnides), the Widow’s daughter.
All of this is predictable but not without promise. It’s only when the actors open their mouths that the promise evaporates. Quinn seems to be modeled either on Big Daddy from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ” or the cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn. It is simply impossible to take him seriously, unless you can make yourself stop laughing. It’s not just the corn-pone accent, but the ridiculous dialogue Csokas has to deliver — which he does badly. Quinn also lives in a kind of dystopian McMansion meant to suggest a Southern plantation. The entire set looks as if it were assembled from leftovers in some Hollywood back lot.
Beecham’s the Widow is equally hilarious, stomping around in thigh-high hooker boots with stiletto heels and costumes that seem to have been filched from the closet of “Snow White’s” Evil Queen.
Knight has the right callow appeal for MK, but his performance is wooden and amateurish.
Wu brings acceptable gravitas to the role of Sunny, but it’s not enough to stanch the constantly flowing loss of credibility through the first two episodes.
The fight scenes do work, however, even if many of them are filmed in that slo-mo “Crouching Tiger” manner that seems to be required of any martial arts scene. As gory as the fight scenes occasionally are, though, we’re mostly happy for them, because at least the actors don’t have to utter any of the inane dialogue.
Although “Badlands” is rooted in Chinese literature, it’s impossible not to contrast it to one of the greatest Japanese films, “The Seven Samurai,” which became the source material for the classic American Western “The Magnificent Seven” in 1960. Nothing could equal Kurosawa, of course, but the Americanization of the story was at least credible as seven hired gunfighters protected a Mexican town from an outlaw gang.
With “Badlands,” though, credibility is all but completely lost in translation, replaced by unintended silliness.