5.6 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.6 |
Decorated Vietnam hero Frank Vega returns home only to get shunned by society leaving him without a job or his high school sweetheart. It's not until forty years later when an incident on a commuter bus (where he protects an elderly black man from a pair of skin heads) makes him a local hero where he's suddenly celebrated once again. But his good fortune suddenly turns for the worse when his best friend Klondike is murdered and the police aren't doing anything about it.
Starring: Danny Trejo, Charles S. Dutton, Ron Perlman, Richard Riehle, Patrick FabianCrime | 100% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Comedy | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, French, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 2.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
When Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his 1976 book on evolution, The Selfish Gene, there's no way he could've known what it would eventually become. With the rise of 4chan and image macros, viral videos, parodies, and remixes, the word has morphed to describe how phenomena can spread across the internet in no time. LOLcats. Rage comics. Bert is Evil. Goatse. (Don't look that last one up.) Then, of course, there are the unintentional YouTube celebrities like Antoine Dodson and Epic Beard Man. The latter refers to white 67-year-old Vietnam vet Thomas Bruso, who was videoed on a bus in Oakland arguing with and then beating up a slightly younger black fellow. Their confrontation is idiotic, and seemingly laced with latent racism on both sides, but Bruso quickly emerged as an internet legend after the original clip netted over a million views in less than 24 hours. That he's so old and can pack such a punch is part of the obvious appeal, but what really makes the clip is Bruso's attire. Along with a genuinely epic beard, he's wearing long shorts, an unironic fanny pack, and a t-shirt that, appropriately enough, reads "I AM A MOTHERF---ER."
I wasn't able to dredge up much internet info on how Bad Ass was filmed, but it looks to me like it was shot digitally, which would also make sense given the movie's low budget. The Blu-ray's 1080p/AVC encode is surprisingly strong considering how terrible the film is otherwise. For evidence of the level of clarity at play, look no further than screenshots of Danny Trejo's iconically pocked and pitted face. In most cases, every wrinkle, line, pore, and mustache hair is neatly resolved. Of course, this extends throughout the image; with few exceptions, whatever's in focus generally looks sharp and defined. Color is dense and stable too, with contrast that sacrifices a bit of shadow detail for a deliberately punchy aesthetic. The image can be slightly noisy, but I suspect this is intentional too—it looks as if some artificial grain might've been added to the picture in post to enhance the grindhouse effect. The dead giveaway that we're looking at digital material? The three or four instances of slow motion in the movie look awful, with noticeable ghosting artifacts and stutter. I'm guessing the slow-mo was done in post, not in-camera, requiring a program to interpolate new frames into the footage. There aren't any other distinct distractions, however—no obvious edge enhancement, detail-smearing DNR, etc. Bad Ass most likely looks as good here as it's ever going to look.
Bad Ass features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track that gets the job done competently, but with few truly kickass aural embellishments. The sound is at its most brutal during the fights, where body blows land with exaggerated, LFE-assisted thumps, and the rear channels get the most action. I wouldn't call this mix "immersive," but it suits the low-rent material rather well, with a decent amount of ambience and effects that have plenty of presence. Todd Haberman's score is clear and modestly engaging, but the film's "theme" is an obnoxiously on-the-nose track by Kid Frost & Big Tank called "I'mA Bad Ass." Nonetheless, it all sounds good dynamically and clarity-wise. Dialogue is always clean, unmuffled, and easily understood, and for those that need or want them, the disc includes optional English SDH, Spanish, and French subtitles.
Bad Ass gets its tone all wrong. For a film like this, it would make more sense to either go way over the top and turn Frank Bruso's story into something approaching Hobo with a Shotgun, or else play it more realistic, digging into the racial undertones of the viral clip and examining how internet stardom has affected a sixty-seven-year-old semi-homeless man. Bad Ass falls squarely in between and subsequently offers little in the way of entertainment or cultural insight. Then again, what do you expect from a writer/director whose last film was called Breaking Wind? The film features an all-around decent Blu-ray presentation, but I'd stay away from this one. You'd probably have more fun watching cat videos on YouTube for an hour and a half.
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