James
Franco has had an interesting career. He
went from starring on cult TV shows like Freaks and Geeks to appearing in big
budget tentpoles like Spider-Man to showing up on soap operas like General Hospital. As a director, he’s even more all over the
place. He’s directed documentaries, Lifetime
movies, Oscar bait stuff, and… uh… this.
(Well, he co-directed it at any rate.) Not only did Franco co-direct Future World, he
also stars as the evil “Warlord”, who rides a motorcycle through the wasteland
raping and terrorizing anyone unfortunate enough to survive the
apocalypse.
It’s
a shame we don’t get as many of these post-apocalyptic movies like we used to. After the success of Mad Max: Fury Road I was hoping for a resurgence of
the genre. The star of The Bad Batch, one
of the few recent post-apocalypse flicks, Suki Waterhouse co-stars as Ash, a top
secret robo-babe Warlord finds in the desert. He reprograms her not only to assassinate but
be his personal concubine. A wet behind
the ears kid (Jeffrey Wahlberg) enters the wasteland looking for medicine for
his dying mom (Lucy Liu) and is clearly no match for Warlord and his men. Ash feels sorry for him, defies her
programming, and helps him escape to “Drug Town” to find a cure for his mother.
The
oddball cast is the only thing that really holds the picture together. Franco gets a lot of mileage out of his
shit-eating grin and general willingness to be unpleasant and sleazy. Milla Jovovich is fun as the wild-eyed ruler
of Drug Town who lords over a bunch of strung out junkies. My favorite bit though was from Snoop Dogg who
plays the owner of a strip club where the dancers wear electronic collars.
Too
bad Wahlberg makes for a terrible hero.
His anti-charisma helps to singlehandedly sink every scene he’s in. Suki isn’t much better, but hey, she’s
playing a robot, so I guess I can give her a free pass for not emoting.
If
there was some action here, it might not be so glaring, but the film just sort
of spins its wheels for most of its running time. What action we do get is rather weak and
derivative. For example, there’s a
Thunderdome-type battle except that instead of taking place inside a badass metal
arena, it’s nothing more than a drained, graffiti-laden swimming pool. The big showdown between Franco and Jovovich
is shockingly anticlimactic and the final confrontation between he and
Waterhouse is somehow even worse.
I thought this one was OK.
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