Bad Ass

 (2012)

Bad Ass Blu-ray offers solid video and great audio, but overall it's a mediocre Blu-ray release
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.

For more about Bad Ass and the Bad Ass Blu-ray release, see the Bad Ass Blu-ray Review

Starring: Danny Trejo, Charles S. Dutton, Ron Perlman, Richard Riehle, Patrick Fabian, Joyful Drake
Director: Craig Moss

» See full cast & crew

Bad Ass Blu-ray Review

Ass Bad?

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, June 10, 2012

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."



And now, with Bad Ass, Bruso's YouTube clip has been adapted for a slightly bigger screen and turned into a quasi-grindhouse-ish straight-to- video exploitation flick starring Danny "I AM A MOTHERF---ER" Trejo. Yes, Trejo, the perpetual b-movie character actor with the face that looks like a termite-eaten fence post. (A.K.A., that guy from Machete.) Before you get too excited at the prospects, Epic Beard Man fans, know this: Bad Ass is awful. Tonally all over the place, borderline boring, and all-around unnecessary-feeling. The film was written and directed by one Craig Moss, whose contributions to the world of cinema include Saving Ryan's Privates, The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It, and a Twilight spoof called Breaking Wind. When it comes to beyond-stupid parody movies, Moss makes Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer look good. Now, if you've seen Disaster Movie or Vampires Suck you may not believe that's possible, but I challenge you to sit through five minutes of Breaking Wind. That Bad Ass is Moss' most accomplished film really isn't saying much, but I'll give the guy credit for at least trying, since there's an obvious attempt here to make something a little more professional and less reliant on poop gags.

The question, of course, is how do you take a three-minute YouTube video and turn it into a feature film? Moss starts with the events of the original clip—in a heavily modified form—and then invents a ridiculous before-and-after scenario that turns Epic Beard Man into a revenge-driven, Charles Bronson-like vigilante with a sad past. Here, Bruso is renamed Frank Vega, a hard-knock hispanic Vietnam veteran and hot dog vendor whose life has slowly passed him by. In a sanitized, less racially complicated version of the bus incident, Vega beats the crap out of two white skinheads who are harassing an innocent elderly black man. When video of the fight goes viral, Vega becomes a celebrated local hero—he gets high-fives on the street, goes on ride-alongs with a friendly cop (Patrick Fabian), and appears on a talk show, where he humbly downplays his heroism.

The film goes into unfettered fiction mode when Vega's best friend, Klondike (Harrison Page), is mysteriously gunned down in the street. The police have no interest in pursuing the case, so Vega goes gumshoe, piecing together clues, tracking suspects, and busting skulls left and right. A conspiracy is obviously afoot, one that involves a missing flash drive—the movie's MacGuffin—a criminal kingpin named Panther (Charles S. Dutton), and the city's crooked mayor, played by an unfortunately underused Ron Perlman. The story plays out in a series of repetitions: 1.) Vega gets a lead about someone tangentially involved, 2.) he hunts the person down, crisscrossing the city on public transportation, 3.) he kicks unholy ass, and 4.) he gets another name out of the now-maimed criminal underling, leading Vega ever-closer to Panther, the man at the top. For variety, the film throws in a next-door love interest named Amber Lamps (Joyful Drake), whose name is a play off the way the bleeding victim of the real Thomas Bruso's attack says "ambulance." All this leads to a bus versus bus action sequence that—I kid you not—has been lifted directly from the 1988 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Red Heat. And when I say lifted directly from I mean that literally—Moss uses the actual footage from Red Heat with a few key digital alterations.

None of this is especially entertaining. The film's problems are manifold, but they all come down to Bad Ass' middle-of-the-road tone. As I see it, there are two better approaches that Moss could've taken. The most obvious would be to go insanely over the top, making Epic Beard Man the next Hobo with a Shotgun or Machete. There are hints of this—like when Vega shoves a baddie's hands down a garbage disposal, leaving behind bloody stumps—but most of the time the film plays it pretty safe. The other route would be to do a hard, honest examination of the real clip's two-way racism and violence, creating more of a drama than a half-baked wannabe grindhouse movie. Unfortunately, Bad Ass limps along in an in-between state, sometimes balls-out violent but also tedious and weirdly paced, with nothing interesting to say about inner-city tensions or internet superstardom. There's nothing "epic" at all about Bad Ass, which probably cost at least a few million dollars to make but will undoubtedly never even come close to being seen by as many people as the original Epic Beard Man video.

Bad Ass Blu-ray, Video Quality

 

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 Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 

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 Blu-ray, Special Features and Extras

 

• Audio Commentary Featuring Craig Moss: The film's writer and director enthusiastically discusses the process of stretching the YouTube video into a feature film. Hardly essential listening, but it's there for those who want it.
• Birth of a Bad Ass (1080p, 6:09): A short promo, featuring interviews with Moss and Danny Trejo.

Bad Ass Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation

 

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.