Just the Ticket #55: A Bad SOA Reunion

As movies that are only kinda bad go, Bad Ass is like the loveable grandparent who says inappropriate things at the dinner table: You laugh on the outside, cringe on the inside, and pray they go back to the nursing home as soon as possible.

Last season's guest villain on Sons Of Anarchy, Danny Trejo, stars as Frank "Bad Ass" Vega, a Vietnam War veteran with Fidel Castro facial hair who becomes a YouView sensation (man, it sucks to not be able to afford the rights to a free social media site, huh?) when he uses his mano-a-mano skills to subdue a pair of rowdy skinheads on a bus. Having guest parts in Bad Ass are SOA regulars Winter Ave Zoli (as a subversive masseuse) and Ron Perlman (Hellboy, reviewed here, as the dirty city official pulling the strings on a shady land deal).

Trejo's Vega takes the accolades and the accompanying perks with a nonchalant wink and a smile bubbling with suppressed ego, but when his best friend is killed while looking into a land deal that would spell the end for their small Los Angeles community, Vega turns vigilante and begins following a word of mouth trail to the culprits and leaving many a broken, bloody nose in his wake.

Stepping off the bus in music-video slow motion to follow up on each successive lead in his blue Commie ball cap, fanny pack, and "I am a Motherfucker" tee-shirt, all to the tune of Kid Frost & Big Tank's "I'm A Bad Ass," Trejo cuts a comically imposing figure as Vega; a sort of Walking Tall-meets-Machete for the HoverRound crowd (my review of Walking Tall can be found here). We've seen in Trejo's faux-trailer-turned-ridiculous-bloodfest Machete that he can fight and be funny, and we see in Bad Ass that even when he's a terrible actor, he exudes enough charm to sort of make you not notice how terrible (case in point, the May/December romance--if it was May 1950 and December 2012--between Vega and his unfortunately named hot neighbor, Amber Lamps, played by Get Him to the Greek's Joyful Drake). At this point in the review, Steven Tyler might say something like "Golden tits and happy-go-ducky, holy crap this shit is sucky!" By the way, catch my review of Get Him to the Greek here.

And while we're on the subject of sucky shit, let's talk about the bus chase (yes, I said bus chase) between Vega and local gang leader, Panther (played by Alien 3's Charles S. Dutton with camp-lite charisma). It's as if Speed and the final chase scene from Fast Five (reviewed here) had a baby, but less believable and more destructive than either. Phone booths, parking meters, plate-glass windows, and poorly parked cars get flattened, spun, and tossed every which way before one bus goes airborne and the other gets hit by a train, and both men walk out of their respective Blue Lines unscathed. No wonder they couldn't afford YouTube.

Somebody call me an Amber Lamps. I think I's gonna be sick.

C+

Big Miracle and Bad Ass may have been blacklisted by the Department of C-Grade Movies, but next time I'll devote a special decimal issue of Just the Ticket to the plight of the blacklisted spy. You've just been issued a Burn Notice, Ticketholders! The Fall of Sam Axe is upon you, so stay tuned.