Land of Bad

Liam Hemsworth and Russell Crowe team up for a tight, tactical military thriller in which elite American soldiers infiltrate a terrorist hub with help from the eye in the sky.

I wasn’t expecting much from “Land of Bad.” Trailers make it look like a standard-issue lower-middling budget military actioner about elite American soldiers traipsing off into some foreign jungle to bring the hurt to brown terrorists — the sort of jingoistic claptrap served up with regularity for a certain kind of audience that I don’t generally jibe with.

But it’s actually a very tight, tactical thriller with plenty of suspense… and even a little poking criticism for the Y-chromosome alpha-bro culture the goes in for this sort of thing.

It stars Liam Hemsworth and Russell Crowe, though very much on opposite ends of the operation.

Hemsworth plays the youngish, untested member of the squad sent into the Philippines to extract a CIA asset who’s been captured. Crowe, who’s too old and round to believably portray a ground grunt, is the seasoned “guy in the chair” who stays back at HQ running the drone aerial support, acting as their “eye in the sky” that surveils the enemy and can also drop ordnance on them, too.

The bad guys are Abu Sayyaf, a real terrorist organization that operates in the Asian theater as a sort of Islamic State eastern campus. Their motivations are not really examined; all we need to know is they have captured a CIA spy and the Americans want him back.

Robert Rabiah plays their leader, a typical sneering Islamic fundamentalist type who’s into cutting off heads with a sword. He gets a good speech taunting the Americans about using airborne technology to kill with the push of a button rather than looking a man in the eye — or woman or child; he’s not picky — before severing their life’s cord.

Crowe is Reaper (his code name), a grizzled Air Force captain who’s good at his job but has seen his career become stuck for his obstinate ways. He joined up to fly planes, and now he flies a desk. As the story opens his wife his about to go into labor, adding to a family that already includes eight kids and three previous spouses. He dubs himself “a romantic” by way of explanation.

Chika Ikogwe plays Staff Sergeant Branson, his wing-woman who actually pilots the drone aircraft. Daniel MacPherson plays the ijit colonel ostensibly in charge of the outfit who’s more concerned with watching basketball on TV than (literally) answering the call of duty.

Hemsworth plays Kinney aka “Playboy,” an Air Force sergeant assigned to an Army Delta Force team to act as their liaison to Reaper. His job is to stay miked up and tuned in and call in intelligence and air strikes from the sky. He was a last-minute replacement for a more seasoned “tier 1” guy, and as such the Deltas aren’t too impressed with him, warning him to STFU and stay out of the way once they hit the ground.

They are led by Sugar (Milo Ventimiglia); the captain who’s calm and precise. The other two members are Bishop (Ricky Whittle), the stern and muscled-up sniper, and Abel (another Hemsworth, older brother Luke), a family man who cuts Playboy a little more slack than the others.

Director William Eubank (“Signal”) co-wrote the script with David Frigerio. They structure things in a traditional way, with early successes followed by setbacks that soon turn into total disasters, necessitating extraordinary efforts to salvage whatever they can from the mission.

Events transpire such that Playboy finds himself separated from his team, with just Reaper and Branson to guide him and save his ass. There’s one very tense sequence where he finds himself beset by two different factions of enemies from each side, including a guy riding a horse. Reaper instinctively designates him as “Bronco Bill.” They also have a dog with a curious sniffer to threaten Playboy in his hidey-hole.

The setup of the team on the ground working with the desk jockeys makes for an interesting dynamic for an action movie. With their sophisticated cameras, Reaper is able to watch everything from above in great detail, so it basically feels like a video game from his end. This dynamic has clearly infected some of his colleagues, who treat it all as something they play at.

Meanwhile, on Playboy’s end it’s very dirty, loud and bloody. He and the other soldiers get pretty thoroughly chewed up over the course of the movie. Playboy more than proves his mettle despite his own lack of confidence and the team’s disdain for him.

Both Playboy and Reaper get their own little redemptive journey to go on, aiding each other and forming a bond via radio communication, a la John McClain and Al Powell in “Die Hard.”

“Land of Bad” may seem at first glance like a dumb macho action movie, but it’s far cleverer and more interesting than, say, the “Expendables” franchise. Here the stars of the show are the guys nobody thought would amount to anything, rather than the dudes always flexing and strutting. It’s the beta males’ time to shine.