Land of Bad (2024)

Land of Bad arrives as a sturdy specimen of the contemporary war thriller, a genre that has largely settled into ritual. William Eubank's film follows a Delta Force rescue mission in the southern Philippines that collapses into a running firefight, leaving a young tactical air controller to crawl toward extraction while a drone pilot named Reaper watches from a Nevada control room. The ensemble is the customary arrangement of weathered operators and grim commanding officers, nearly all of them white men. Ricky Whittle appears as a Black Delta operator and Chika Ikogwe as a female sensor operator beside Reaper. Both perform their functions capably and neither is asked to carry any argument about the demographics of American warfare. The film is content to let them work.

The most visible figure is Staff Sergeant Nia Branson, played by Ikogwe, who keeps the drone aloft and the control room's conscience intact. She is competent, unflappable, and entirely in service of the men on the ground. Her reward, in the closing minutes, is to be walked down the aisle at her wedding by her colleague, a beat the film presents as warmth. Progressive readings are available to anyone determined to find them, but the film itself proposes nothing of the sort. Its anger is institutional, aimed at distracted commanders and a base crew too absorbed in a basketball broadcast to answer a phone. That is a grievance about negligence, not about economics.

Where the film does raise its voice, it raises it at length. Reaper's climactic tirade about the men who nearly died while the break room watched March Madness carries the unmistakable tone of a sermon, and critics heard it plainly. The film wants to say something about modern military dysfunction, and it says it twice. It remains a competent thriller with a modest homiletic streak, sincere in its affections and unsubtle in its delivery.