Seann William Scott's Buddy Action Movie Is Really Bad, Man

Well, there’s Good Cop, Bad Cop, and then there’s Inept Cop, Belligerent Moron. Bad Man is the latter, a curious and extremely ineffectual explosion of misogyny and violence centered around two dopes. Lazily thrown together and held together by racist and sexual barbs, it is a confounding mess that loses interest almost immediately. Though my cinephilia is broad-ranging, I am willing to admit that sometimes a film is not for me, though Bad Man is the kind of drivel that shouldn’t appeal to anyone.

Bad Man Is An Affront On All Levels

Colt Lake, Tennessee (population 2,512) is facing a meth epidemic. So, too, are they facing a crime wave, or at least a sudden murder on Main Street has rocked this tiny community to its core, sending a ripple through which everyone sees an opportunity to claim power.

For Deputy Sam Evans (Johnny Simmons), a former basketball star and current laughingstock, solving a scandalous murder could be a path towards respect. Mayor Boone (Jack Conley) wants to use it as an excuse to clean out the streets; though, how many are there? Two?

Then there’s rogue undercover agent Bobby Gaines (Seann William Scott), who shows up like a tornado, hell-bent on… I don’t know. Look, I don’t want to give anything away out of journalistic integrity, but suffice it to say that Gaines is obviously hiding a lot, and it’s so patently absurd no one calls this out that you might find yourself shouting at the screen.

…the problem is real for the whole film, improperly balanced as it is between bro humor and gang violence.

Scott is magnificently bad as Gaines. He honestly doesn’t seem too far removed from American Pie, though maybe that’s Michael Diliberti’s fault for writing an egotistical man whose braggadocio hinges on his apparent time “bringing Jesus” to Iraq. One of the film’s more bizarre offenses is presenting Gaines as more evolved than his coworkers. At one point, the film has him call out the racism of the locals, while he also asserts that without him, we’d be “speaking Arabic.” I guess anti-Arab sentiment doesn’t count as racism to Diliberti.

Evans and Gaines are tasked by Jesus-loving Chief of Police Sandy (Rob Riggle, possibly the film’s only genuine source of joy) to find out who killed their corpse and why. The late Chase Perdomo (formerly of Netflix’s Gen V) is also here as Evans’ best friend and partner, DJ, whose main quality in this film is that he’s a slacker. Perdomo’s inherent charm notwithstanding, the role is completely dispensable.

Evans is also in love with the mayor’s daughter, Izzy (singer Lovi Poe), and, in between the film’s lackluster stabs at tension, it tries to convince us to care about this romance. Izzy is Filipino, and DJ is Black, and though the movie does make a few satirical references to the simultaneous fetishism and scapegoating of minorities, Diliberti (who wrote, directed, and edited Bad Man) mostly indulges in the same. Both characters’ ethnicities are played for laughs, or else they are exoticized.

At some point, Gaines and Evans trace the murder to Dog Downer’s crew (Ethan Suplee, acting in a completely different, more sober film). Bad Man then acts as if it hadn’t spent the first two-thirds sitting around making sex jokes and tries to balance it with kinetic action. It doesn’t work, and the problem is real for the whole film, improperly balanced as it is between bro humor and gang violence.

At one point, Gaines tells Evans that there is no such thing as a good man, just bad men, and men who bend but don’t break. But, I don’t know what that means, really. Sometimes a film is just bad, whether or not it’s for me.