Movie review - Bad Hombres

Bad Hombres **1/2 (out of 5) This is a gritty little action drama based in the drug trade and illegal immigration along the US/Mexican border in the dusty southwest. We start with Felix (Diego Tinoco) and his cousin competing for day labor in a Home Depot-type of parking lot. The cousin, who’s been here a while, is showing him how to get by despite his almost complete lack of English. The two get separated, leaving Felix haplessly like a fish out of water. A friendly, chatty Aussie (Liam Hemsworth) hires him and a surly old guy with a truck, Alfonso (Hemky Madera), to do some digging in the desert, supposedly at his uncle’s ranch.

When they get to the remote location, they’re told to dig a big hole and start doing it. They soon learn there ain’t no uncle and the hole is for dumping bodies of rival drug thugs Hemsworth and his partner dispatched, and that they’re soon likely to be loose ends who know too much. Never good for one’s life expectancy. Alfonso grasps the picture faster and takes some measures to get the two away from their “employers”. The rest of the movie is the pair dashing around, trying to avoid getting killed by those guys or a rival gang’s hitter (Tyrese Gibson) who is on his own quest for dudes to eliminate. Oh. There’s also a missing few million in cash to add to everyone’s motivation and urgency.

This one’s gory all the way, with a high body count in terms of the percentage of the small cast that doesn’t survive to the roll of the credits. They may have spent more on fake blood and blanks for the guns than on lighting and craft services combined. There’s suspense about who will be more or less important to the story, and wind up on the good side or bad when the dust settles. I must advise that the biggest names in the cast – Gibson, Hemsworth and Thomas Jane - don’t necessarily get the most screen time. If you’re drawn to this one because they’re in it (as was I), you may be disappointed.

Apart from that, director/co-writer John Stahlberg Jr. maintains a good pace as the scene rotates among numerous arenas of contemporaneous action, sustaining several aspects of suspense throughout, with a couple of twists along the way. That’s about as much as one can reasonably ask for from low-budget, guilty-pleasure crime flicks like this.

(Bad Hombres, in English with some subtitled Spanish, in theaters and On Demand as of 1/26/24)