One of the easiest things to do today is to make a movie that looks and sounds professional. The advances in filmmaking equipment and the wealth of information about the industry now easily available enable almost anyone with enough ambition to achieve production values that would have made Roger Corman green with envy. None of which makes it easier to make a good motion picture. It merely allows even the most talentless boob to make motion pictures that look good.
All of which makes me wonder from what primordial soup of suck did the ancestors of writer/director Adamo Paolo Cultraro crawl? What parallel evolution occurred in the stupidest crevices on Earth to produce someone capable of creating a 2009 film that looks and sounds as appalling as Bad Ass? Beyond the atrocious writing, the camera work that gets to be laugh out loud horrible, a cast largely made up of doofuses apparently yanked out of line at the DMV and Tom Sizemore vamping his way through a performance that if he wasn't high during it, he got high afterwards in order to forget it, this thing is a brutal example of technical incompetence. I've honestly seen movies worse than this. I don't think I've ever encountered a flick more poorly made.
Corrado (Johnny Messner) is a hit-man/collection agent/douchebag with horrible tattoos who is hired to kill an aging mobster (Ken Kercheval. That's right. Ken Kercheval) and make it look like natural causes. The mobster's nurse (Candace Elaine) interrupts him in the act, Corrado just shoots the guy and then he and the nurse spend the rest of the movie trying to get away from the thugs sent after them by the mobster's tweaky son (Tom Sizemore). There's a cavalcade of cruddy sets, fraudulent locations, horrible line readings, even more horrible improv, awkwardly incapable fight scenes and a hard faced lead actress who looks about 25 years too old for her part. Then the whole thing just flies apart at the end like a defective roller coaster.
The wretched storytelling, however, doesn't even come close to equaling the visual and audio stench that assaults you from the astonishingly bad filmmaking. The sound quality here would have been notably deficient in some dirt cheap piece of 1960s exploitation cinema. For a movie to sound this awful in 2009 almost defies explanation. You can hear the sound level and background noise change as shots switch from one character to another, when you can even make out what anyone is saying at all. There's a scene where the camera is focused on one character and starts to pan over to another, then hastily jerks back to the first guy because the cameraman forgot the actor still had another thing to do in the scene. That wasn't some deleted moment scene thrown onto the DVD in the "special features" menu. They left it in the film. There's another scene where a guy is holding a gun to someone's head and the camera is shooting him from such an angle that his outstretched arm completely covers the lower half of his face. And that shot isn't a momentary lapse. It does on like that for like a minute or so with the guy talking and the audience unable to see his mouth move.
And Tom Sizemore oh, Tom Sizemore. He's clearly improving at least 95% of his dialog and gives every impression that he's doing it in some altered mental state. There's at least a half dozen points in Bad Ass where you can see the other actors have no idea where Sizemore is going or how they're supposed to react to him. There's also a moment where is sure seems the director just threw his hands in the air, set the camera on a wide shot and let Sizemore do whatever he wanted, resulting in what looks like an outtake from Dr. Drew's Celebrity Rehab.
I can only hope Adamo Paolo Cultraro was some 41 year old video store clerk who still lived in his parent's basement while fruitlessly fantasizing about being the next Quentin Tarantino and his mom and dad cashed in their retirement savings so he could make this film and it would serve as sort of an intervention. There's no way anyone with a functioning brain stem could makes something like this, see it on the screen and still think they had a chance in hell of ever making movies for a living. For his sake, that crushing realization should have sent Adamo Paolo Cultraro fleeing from Hollywood and into some career he might prosper in, like cleaning the drains at public pools or sterilizing the equipment at liposuction clinics.
All of which makes me wonder from what primordial soup of suck did the ancestors of writer/director Adamo Paolo Cultraro crawl? What parallel evolution occurred in the stupidest crevices on Earth to produce someone capable of creating a 2009 film that looks and sounds as appalling as Bad Ass? Beyond the atrocious writing, the camera work that gets to be laugh out loud horrible, a cast largely made up of doofuses apparently yanked out of line at the DMV and Tom Sizemore vamping his way through a performance that if he wasn't high during it, he got high afterwards in order to forget it, this thing is a brutal example of technical incompetence. I've honestly seen movies worse than this. I don't think I've ever encountered a flick more poorly made.
Corrado (Johnny Messner) is a hit-man/collection agent/douchebag with horrible tattoos who is hired to kill an aging mobster (Ken Kercheval. That's right. Ken Kercheval) and make it look like natural causes. The mobster's nurse (Candace Elaine) interrupts him in the act, Corrado just shoots the guy and then he and the nurse spend the rest of the movie trying to get away from the thugs sent after them by the mobster's tweaky son (Tom Sizemore). There's a cavalcade of cruddy sets, fraudulent locations, horrible line readings, even more horrible improv, awkwardly incapable fight scenes and a hard faced lead actress who looks about 25 years too old for her part. Then the whole thing just flies apart at the end like a defective roller coaster.
The wretched storytelling, however, doesn't even come close to equaling the visual and audio stench that assaults you from the astonishingly bad filmmaking. The sound quality here would have been notably deficient in some dirt cheap piece of 1960s exploitation cinema. For a movie to sound this awful in 2009 almost defies explanation. You can hear the sound level and background noise change as shots switch from one character to another, when you can even make out what anyone is saying at all. There's a scene where the camera is focused on one character and starts to pan over to another, then hastily jerks back to the first guy because the cameraman forgot the actor still had another thing to do in the scene. That wasn't some deleted moment scene thrown onto the DVD in the "special features" menu. They left it in the film. There's another scene where a guy is holding a gun to someone's head and the camera is shooting him from such an angle that his outstretched arm completely covers the lower half of his face. And that shot isn't a momentary lapse. It does on like that for like a minute or so with the guy talking and the audience unable to see his mouth move.
And Tom Sizemore oh, Tom Sizemore. He's clearly improving at least 95% of his dialog and gives every impression that he's doing it in some altered mental state. There's at least a half dozen points in Bad Ass where you can see the other actors have no idea where Sizemore is going or how they're supposed to react to him. There's also a moment where is sure seems the director just threw his hands in the air, set the camera on a wide shot and let Sizemore do whatever he wanted, resulting in what looks like an outtake from Dr. Drew's Celebrity Rehab.
I can only hope Adamo Paolo Cultraro was some 41 year old video store clerk who still lived in his parent's basement while fruitlessly fantasizing about being the next Quentin Tarantino and his mom and dad cashed in their retirement savings so he could make this film and it would serve as sort of an intervention. There's no way anyone with a functioning brain stem could makes something like this, see it on the screen and still think they had a chance in hell of ever making movies for a living. For his sake, that crushing realization should have sent Adamo Paolo Cultraro fleeing from Hollywood and into some career he might prosper in, like cleaning the drains at public pools or sterilizing the equipment at liposuction clinics.