Perhaps because I'd been reading about this movie for years, I was expecting a lot more than I found. What I found was an uninteresting movie about uninteresting characters based on uninteresting people. If your idea of "interesting" is someone like Starkweather (OR his Real Life gal pal), consider yourself one of the Easily Entertained. Martin Sheen's point-and-shoot performance has all the depth of a target range cutout. The direction is nigh nonexistent: there's not one iota of SUSPENSE in scenes that in Real Life would've no doubt been TENSE and HORRIFYING: here, they're simply presented in a matter-of-fact manner, like a walk-through tour of a museum. (Compare this one to the ZODIAC movie of just a few years ago, or the Korean nail-biter, MEMORIES OF MURDER.) The most interesting thing about BADLANDS is the cinematography.
