Craig Moss

(On TV, May 2020) After a few parody films, writer-director Craig Moss gets more ambitious and tries his hand at a low-budget action film starring Danny Trejo as an older man who beat up a few people and becomes a viral sensation. (It’s adapted from a then-viral video, now almost forgotten.) Then the less interesting part of the film begins as he tries to solve the murder of a dear friend. As a straight-to-video action thriller, Bad Ass just about delivers the goods: An interesting trio headlines the film (Trejo, Charles S. Dutton and—briefly—Ron Perlman) but there isn’t much in the script to give them anything interesting to do. It’s an exploitation film that plays it straight, with the only distinction being that it’s an elderly veteran going on a rampage of revenge than some other kind of action hero. Trejo isn’t bad in the lead performance, which is fortunate considering that the entire film depends on it. An expensive-looking bus chase audaciously reuses footage from the climax of Red Heat. That’s worth a few chuckles by itself, which is unfortunately just as much as the rest of the film combined. An unobjectionable but unremarkable evening-filler, Bad Ass is going to have the exact same lifespan of an Internet meme.