At the center of Paul W.S. Anderson’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s short story “In the Lost Lands” is Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich), a witch whose business dealings are known to end in ironic tragedy. Nevertheless, she’s tasked to obtain the gift of transforming into a werewolf for the queen (Amara Okereke) of a city built into a mountain, and to do so, Gray Alys contracts the hunter Boyce (Dave Bautista) to take her into the titular realm.
Anyone who’s seen his Resident Evil films and adaptations of Monster Hunter and The Three Musketeers knows that Anderson doesn’t place stock in fidelity to his source material. For one, there’s nothing in Martin’s story to suggest the post-apocalyptic Mad Max-esque world that the film portrays, a wasteland of skeletal ironwork blasted into shades of brown and gray. There are bloodthirsty church agents here who wear old-timey medieval robes, but as filtered through Anderson’s vision, they accessorize with aviator sunglasses and semiautomatic pistols.
Littered with skulls and crosses of varying sizes, the setting feels above all else like an adaptation of a heavy-metal album cover. Early on, we see a monolithic cross standing at the outskirts of the film’s central city, and in short order we see a much smaller one that doubles as the balancing block beneath Gray Alys’s feet when church enforcers are about to hang her as a witch. She escapes with a lot of the whooshing and sliding characteristic of Jovovich’s action roles, in addition to vague mind powers that come and go as the story demands.
Apart from a certain grim resignation toward leaving her clients unsatisfied, Gray Alys is pretty much the hyper-competent badass that Jovovich plays in other Anderson films. But more so than in the Resident Evil films and Monster Hunter, in which her characters (which were invented by Anderson for the movies) are at times awkwardly stitched into the proceedings, Jovovich is the centerpiece here, granting In the Lost Lands a satisfying clarity of focus.
The story moves cleanly from point A to point B, and it’s all given a slight western tinge by Bautista’s ever-growling cowboy archetype, who’s often seen in wide shots that emphasize his hatted silhouette. There’s no chemistry between him and Jovovich, but he’s a magnetic presence in the tightly choreographed action scenes, and it’s hard to complain about a character who’s inspired to booby-trap a holstered shotgun with a two-headed snake.
The dreary cutaways to backroom politicking only emphasize that In the Lost Lands is better served when guided by a tenacious trashmonger’s imagination. At its simplest, the story frees Anderson to whip up some arresting imagery, from a dry riverbed overflowing with skulls to a school bus dangling between skyscrapers as a makeshift cable car. The digital world here never looks real, with the desaturated images and abundance of lens flares making it initially unclear whether Gray Alys is supposed to have gray hair. But “real” has never interested Anderson, and his latest provides him with a sturdy canvas for his unique brand of gaudy, campy cool.
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