A basic streaming programmer with a fascinating premise, 40 Acres was made to be in the “Top Ten Movies Today” category on Netflix for a week and then forgotten. Danielle Deadwyler plays Hailey Freeman, the matriarch of a family of soldiers in a post apocalyptic world where most animal life has died out. Their mission is to protect what they possess of the world’s most valuable resource: 40 acres of farmland. Raiders come crawling out of the wilderness for their crops, but Hailey’s strict policy against outside-world connections keeps the Freemans safe, until one infiltration springs from inside her own home.
Sounds thrilling, doesn’t it? There’s plenty to the thrill of a twelve-year-old loading her automatic while running through corn fields, but the film’s chamber is emotionally empty. A standard “Please parents, I want more than this life” Disney narrative is made more basic by having emotional moments spring from nowhere. There’s no build-up or emotional truth to how our characters act. Instead, they run through the motions of rebellion and compromise between action set-pieces that similarly feel made for television.
There’s a scourge to modern action filmmaking that comes from IP-driven blockbusters and the limits of television budgeting. Rather than having action sequences that develop or possibly ramp into crescendos, the hero we’re following is placed in peril until another character comes on screen to save them. Think how often “and then so-and-so shows up and the tide turns” could be applied to a Jurassic World picture or low-budget cop show. 40 Acres suffers the same fate, wasting its fascinating world on television-level direction, overdramatic dialogue, and action scenes without development.
