Land of Bad

A rescue operation in the Philippines goes wrong and Sergeant JJ Kinney, a TACP operator, is left alone in the field. His only support is Captain Eddie Grimm, flying a drone from a control station thousands of miles away. William Eubank directed. Russell Crowe plays Grimm and Liam Hemsworth plays Kinney. The script was originally called JTAC and was developed by Eubank and David Frigerio across 2012 and 2013. The structure is close to real time and the tension is split between two places: the man running on the ground and the man watching a screen. It resolves on a failure of communication and a decision taken in seconds. Filming ran from September to November 2022 in Queensland, Australia. Sixty-seven percent of 66 Rotten Tomatoes reviews are positive, with Metacritic at 57. Critics found the set pieces exciting and wrote that the film leans too hard on genre conventions. On a 20 million dollar budget it opened in 1,130 theatres in February 2024 and took only 7 million worldwide. Who it is for: viewers interested in military action and drone warfare. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a political position. The film does not interrogate what the drone is; it uses it as a tension device.