As you may know, new westerns in this day and age are kind of hard to find, and most of them aren't very good. "Badland" is a western that unfortunately falls into the bad movie category, even for someone like me who really loves the western genre. I knew this was going to be a bad movie when I saw that the Cinedigm company was the distributor, and shortly afterwards when the first scene started to unfold, I instantly saw how incredibly cheap and tacky the production design looked like. But that was small potatoes compared to the real problem with the movie, which was how utterly slow and boring it played out. There's no grit, no energy, and no clear love of the genre. Instead, we just get a collection of various western clichés and dialogue executed in the flattest way possible. The presence of the charismatic Bruce Dern managed to lift my rating to 2 stars out of 10 instead of just one star, but only barely. Not recommended even as a movie to play in the background while you concentrate more on another activity in your home.
