'Into The Badlands' Review: So Close To Being Good, But…
There is so much talent involved in the making of Into The Badlands, it’s impossible to dismiss its tedium as mediocrity. The new AMC show is packed with rigorously choreographed and slicingly edited action scenes, and it builds a mythology that combines elements of Asian martial-arts movies, American Westerns, film noir, horror, biker flicks, and nighttime soap operas — I mean, this thing seems built to succeed. Yet it doesn’t. Why?
Conceived by Al Gough and Miles Millar, the men who did a bang-up job revitalizing the Superman origin-story with Smallville, Into the Badlands pulls you into a post-apocalyptic landscape where the American Midwest is now the site of warring factions led by competing barons. Its central figure is Daniel Wu’s ironically named Sunny, a doom-struck brooder who looks great on a motorcycle and can dice up multiple foes at once with his martial-arts fighting, acrobatics, and big, big swords.
When Sunny removes his shirt, his back is festooned with hash-marks that notch his kills, and he spends a lot of time in the tattoo parlor, because Sunny is a killing machine, loyal to the baron Quinn (Marton Csokas), himself a vicious brute with a Southern drawl (“Ah snapped that boy’s neck in 10 seconds flat. The was the first time Ah evah felt alive!”)
There’s a certain amount of world-building done in the first hour, mainly vocabulary lessons: the Baron’s kill squads are Cutters; the youngest recruits are Colts. Sunny picks up a young disciple in MK (Aramis Knight — they should have used the kid’s real name as his character’s), a troubled youth who turns super-humanly aggressive any time he’s cut and bleeds. MK has a pendant with a symbol of the city of Azra that holds a special meaning for Sunny.
Women are well-represented in the show — in the first two episodes made available for review, we get to know the Baron called The Widow (Emily Beecham), who’s more clever than the guys and who gets her own big fight scene in the series’ second hour. Also introduced is the Widow’s loyal young adept, the equally skilled battler Tilda, played by Ally Ioannides (Dylan from Parenthood!).
The one-against-many fight-scene set-pieces are staged very well by a team headed up by director-actor Stephen Fung (House of Fury) and action choreographer Ku Huen Chiu (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).
But one big problem with Badlands is its punishingly dour tone, utterly devoid of humor or any fleeting moments of lightness. Like Gotham, Badlands suffers from an excess of grim-’n’-grittiness — you want to take its creators aside and counsel that they add a dash more wit to the various genres they’ve combined.
That and the power-behind-the-throne scheming being done — the betrayals and the melancholy pasts of key characters — seem like the kind of storytelling we’ve seen too much of recently, in everything from Game of Thrones to AMC’s two Walking Dead shows. I just wish Into The Badlands was more fun.
Into The Badlands airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on AMC.
