Hampered by often inexplicable decisions made by the primary characters, Bad Ass lumbers along until it reaches its big “who cares?” conclusion. The storytelling is confusing and the acting is uniformly stilted and unconvincing. There isn’t really any “guilty pleasure” value here, as the movie is just too dull to even laugh at. The whole viral-video-celebrity concept isn’t explored to any notable degree, after a while it becomes irrelevant that Vega had 15 minutes of internet fame. Incidentally, the film’s climatic bus chase is cobbled together with footage borrowed from the old Schwarzenegger flick, Red Heat (1988). Here’s some good advice, check out that otherwise unrelated movie instead of wasting 90 minutes with Bad Ass.
Bad Ass looks pretty solid in its AVC-encoded 1080p transfer, framed at 1.85:1. The movie was shot digitally and the resulting picture is clean and sharp, with realistic colors. The level of fine detail is reasonably high, capturing every line and pit in Trejo’s especially weathered-looking face. Overall it’s nothing to get too excited about, but for a low budget movie it looks impressive. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix is similarly acceptable, with always intelligible dialogue. The score sounds a little thin and at times too quiet, but the action scenes feature a good amount of bottom end and surround channel activity.
Audio commentary by writer-director Craig Moss is the primary feature on this sparsely supplemented Blu-ray. A sampling of the commentary track revealed an enthusiastic Moss delivering quite a bit of information about the production. If you enjoy the film, it’s worth a listen. Additionally there is a brief featurette called “Birth a Bad Ass” that is the usual mix of interviews, behind the scenes footage, and film clips.
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