IN THE LOST LANDS (2025)

Studio:   Constantin Film
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer:   Constantin Werner, Paul W.S. Anderson
Producer: Paul W.S. Anderson, Jeremy Bolt, Milla Jovovich, Dave Bautista, Constantin Werner, Jonathan Meisner, Robert Kulzer
Stars:    Milla Jovovich, Dave Bautista, Arly Jover, Amara Okereke, Fraser James, Simon Loof, Deirdre Mullins, Tue Lunding, Eveline Hall, Sebastian Stankiewicz

Review Score:

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Summary:

A witch and a mercenary brave a post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of a shapeshifter whose power is desired by a queen.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In a post-apocalyptic world where all remaining humans dwell in a city under a mountain on the outskirts of a wasteland overrun by twisted creatures, The Enforcer, who commands warrior monks that serve the city’s religious leader The Patriarch, prepares to publicly hang the outcast witch Gray Alys. Using her magic, Gray Alys escapes the monks and leaves The Enforcer hanging in the noose instead, inspiring onlookers to revere her power.

The Queen and her consort Jerais later visit Gray Alys. Claiming she never refuses a request, Gray Alys accepts an arrangement to venture into “The Lost Lands” to kill a shapeshifter so The Queen may inherit its ability to transform into a wolf. Gray Alys promises to fulfill The Queen’s task before the next full moon.

6 DAYS UNTIL THE FULL MOON

In exchange for a keepsake timepiece, Gray Alys makes a separate, private deal with Jerais to fail The Queen’s request. In the meantime, The Queen, who despises her bedridden husband The Overlord, sees her secret lover Boyce, a skilled hunter known for traveling the wasteland.

After getting acquainted in a bar, Gray Alys successfully hires Boyce to guide her through The Lost Lands. Boyce claims they can find a shapeshifter named Sardor in Skull River, an ominous location Gray Alys sees in a predictive vision.

The Enforcer leads a band of monks to attack Gray Alys and Boyce as heretics, but the witch and the mercenary escape the city. The Patriarch tasks The Enforcer with hunting down the duo.

With Gray Alys becoming a symbol of defiance among the city’s impoverished working class, The Patriarch and The Enforcer torture an acquaintance of Gray Alys into revealing that The Queen and Jerais visited the sorceress prior to her escape. The Patriarch sees an opportunity to finally topple The Overlord’s rule and take control of the city for his church.

5 DAYS UNTIL THE FULL MOON

Gray Alys and Boyce stop at a trading post where they are greeted by Boyce’s friends Ross and Mara, the latter of whom is Boyce’s frequent lover. Boyce spends the night with Mara.

4 DAYS UNTIL THE FULL MOON

The Queen angrily confronts The Patriarch over him sending armed forces after Gray Alys. The Patriarch indicates he knows of rumors about her infidelity, and claims there will be a new dawn coming because The Overlord is dying and he has no heir. Meanwhile, The Enforcer’s monks torture Ross and Mara into revealing that Gray Alys and Boyce are heading to Skull River.

3 DAYS UNTIL THE FULL MOON

Gray Alys and Boyce arrive at “The Rift” looking for Boyce’s friend Cyrus to get them across a gorge. The Enforcer and her monks confront the duo to reveal they got there first and killed Cyrus. The Enforcer also brings out Mara in restraints and kills her in front of Boyce, who immediately becomes enraged.

A fierce fight ensues between Gray Alys, Boyce, and The Enforcer’s monks. Gray Alys and Boyce eventually escape across a long cable to the other side of the canyon. The Enforcer fires a bullet into Boyce’s back as he escapes, but Gray Alys uses her hypnotizing magic to prevent The Enforcer from firing again. Afterward, Gray Alys and Boyce bond while recovering around a campfire.

2 DAYS UNTIL THE FULL MOON

The Queen learns she is pregnant with Boyce’s child, which gives the royal family an heir to the throne. To retain power for herself, The Queen suffocates The Overlord to death in his bed.

Gray Alys and Boyce travel to Shadows Bane, where they battle a horde of undead creatures. After one of the sentient zombies confronts Gray Alys with the revelation that he knows her, Gray Alys uses a spell to destroy the horde with fire.

1 DAY UNTIL THE FULL MOON

The Patriarch publicly announces The Overlord’s death, officially putting The Queen on the throne. Despite the prospect of an heir, The Patriarch privately reaffirms his demand that The Enforcer bring him proof of a collaboration with Gray Alys so he may execute The Queen for working with a witch.

In “The Fire Fields,” Gray Alys contends no one should get close to her because she is cursed. Boyce tells her he doesn’t care.

Gray Alys lures The Enforcer into driving her train of monks off a broken bridge to their deaths. Back in the city, Jerais assassinates The Patriarch on behalf of The Queen, who used their romantic relationship to manipulate Jerais into action.

At Skull River, Gray Alys reveals that due to the vision she had earlier, along with additional clues, she knew there was no Sardor and that Boyce was the real shapeshifter all along. During the full moon, Boyce transforms into a massive wolf to attack Gray Alys. Gray Alys defeats Boyce in combat, but spares his life. When he reverts to human form, however, Boyce discovers Gray Alys restrained him in heavy chains and poisoned his blood with silver.

Knowing she cannot refuse, Boyce makes a final request, which is for he and Gray Alys to hunt together. Boyce agrees to her stipulation that he will have to pay a heavy price. Gray Alys waits for the moon to transform him again and then kills Boyce.

Gray Alys returns to the city, where workers hail her as a symbol of their revolution against The Overlord and the church. Gray Alys gives the wolf pelt she skinned off of Boyce to Jerais, who demands the return of his timepiece since Gray Alys did not fail The Queen like she promised. Gray Alys claims she gave Jerais what he actually wanted, which was a free path to be with The Queen now that her secret lover is dead.

The Queen has an emotional breakdown upon realizing Boyce was the slain wolf. Angered at his betrayal, The Queen stabs Jerais in his throat. The Queen then reveals she wanted to become a shapeshifter like Boyce so the two of them could be together.

Angry workers storm the citadel to kill The Queen. When dawn breaks, Boyce’s pelt burns away in the sunlight.

Having been resurrected through her preplanned magic, Boyce returns to the city to shoot Gray Alys for killing him. Gray Alys tells Boyce she knew The Queen’s desire would spark a revolution, and that Boyce would be able to resurrect because The Queen would never be able to wear his skin. She also predicts Boyce’s gun will misfire.

Still vengeful over what she did, Boyce tries to shoot Gray Alys, but his gun misfires like she predicted. The two of them put knives against each other’s throats before laughing and riding off into The Lost Lands.

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Review:

A narrated introduction is generally considered a no-no in moviemaking. What with film being a visual medium, an audience should be shown, not told, how a fantasy setting looks, feels, and functions. There are exceptions, like the opening crawl in “Star Wars,” although that’s meant more to establish what point we’re at in an overall arc, not to belch out a bunch of lore the budget couldn’t afford to put onscreen.

That’s how “In the Lost Lands” starts off on the wrong hoof. Dave Bautista, as his character Boyce, strides straight toward the camera, coming so close that the frame cuts off his forehead. Breaking the fourth wall to address the viewer directly, Boyce/Bautista promises “a tale of magic and witches, of quests and of monsters, of good and of evil.” That already sounds epic even before he adds how this particular post-apocalyptic place was “consumed by the flames of a great war long ago, when death rained from the sky,” leaving “The Lost Lands filled with twisted creatures that dwell in the shadows.” Cool. What he fails to disclose is that most of this seemingly sprawling story actually takes place through conversations in closeup, with the world itself fleetingly glimpsed only in soft-focus CGI wide shots lasting four seconds or less.

Bautista basically plays Boyce as his take on Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, except as a gunslinger who does considerably more talking. When he’s not playing mercenary out in The Lost Lands, Boyce secretly beds The Queen, whose dying husband The Overlord rules in absentia over the mountainside city where all remaining humans dwell.

The Queen has a special assignment for Gray Alys, a powerful witch being hunted for heresy by The Patriarch, the city’s resident zealot who desperately wants religion to rule the realm. The Queen hires Gray Alys to find a shapeshifter whose ability to turn into a wolf The Queen wishes to take for herself. Getting to the ominously named Skull River where this shapeshifter supposedly resides requires a guide, in turn requiring Gray Alys to hire Boyce as an experienced escort.

Boomeranging back to “Star Wars” for a second, when Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi first venture to Mos Eisley to contract Han Solo and Chewbacca, we see Obi-Wan accosted by two villains. Kenobi pulls out his lightsaber to cut down the duo, giving us two notable pieces of information: that Obi-Wan is more than a mere old man, and that disinterested patrons see this sort of slaughter all the time. We subsequently see Han’s memorable interaction with Greedo, where his under-the-table blaster fire cements him as a scandalous rogue. The cantina is also crowded with a bevy of beastly beings, instilling a sense of a much wider world where aliens of varied backgrounds drink, fight, and do black market business.

In contrast, here’s how “In the Lost Lands” handles its similar setup of Gray Alys approaching Boyce in a bar. Boyce sits alone at a dimly lit table with a blurred background, providing little perspective on the people or the place that exists outside of these six square feet. He and Gray Alys play one hand of normal cards, with her three aces beating his three kings, offering an opening for her to solicit his gun-for-hire services. None of the intrigue, none of the characterization, and none of the world-building that “Star Wars” did in the same amount of time is anywhere to be found until The Enforcer, the leader of The Patriarch’s cadre of warrior monks, shows up to finally dust up a little action.

Once expositional matters are settled, Gray Alys and Boyce set out for the digitally rendered wasteland. An interstitial map teases upcoming locations like “Shadows Bane,” “The Rift,” “Gray Dunes,” and “Fire Fields” before reaching Skull River. But first, the sorceress and her bodyguard stop at “Trading Post,” a bland, beige blah where the two of them simply spend the night, although Boyce spends it in the company of another woman he sleeps with when he’s not sneakily having sex with The Queen.

From here, Gray Alys and Boyce continue following a predictable point-to-point pattern of delivering dialogue at each other in between few-and-far-between action whenever The Enforcer’s monks momentarily catch up, or when the protagonist pair briefly encounters a small circle of undead monsters out of nowhere. “In the Lost Lands” comes up with a couple of decent concepts for creatures and costumes, though none of them are impressively imaginative designs that haven’t been seen before.

“In the Lost Lands” bases its script on the same-named short story by vaunted “Game of Thrones” creator George R.R. Martin, so it’s no surprise his yarn features a corrupt church, political assassinations, and illicit affairs tied to backstabbing machinations. In addition to Dave Bautista, who has built a career out of appearing in big blockbusters, the film stars Milla Jovovich, herself no stranger to major movies with big bankbooks, especially with her recurring role in the “Resident Evil” franchise directed by her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson, who directs her again here in addition to cowriting the screenplay and co-producing.

Putting everyone’s pedigrees together, it’s amusing, strange, or sad (choose your own term) to see names normally associated with huge Hollywood projects slumming it in a B-movie filmed in front of a green screen in Poland. The entire production looks like it was shot on one tight soundstage, with consumer-grade VFX filling in a few blanks in this suspiciously underpopulated world. The made-for-cable taste is tolerable when you want to whet your entertainment appetite with the guilty-pleasure flavor of Syfy-level fare. There’s less incentive to spend 90 nothing minutes if you expect anything above syndicated TV standards.

Review Score: 40

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