Movie Review

Southland Tales (R)

Jenny Peters

Movie Info

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Hollywood.com Says
This unwatchable futuristic flick created by the same guy who did Donnie Darko is a mess of half-baked ideas and untentionally laughable performances.

Story
Set in post-World War III Los Angeles, Southland Tales takes place over the three days leading up to a huge Fourth of July celebration as the world is crumbling around the city’s citizens, who are living in a city that has been turned into an armed camp by the government. There’s a huge cast of characters in this disjointed tale written and directed by Richard Kelly, including Boxer Santaros (Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson), an action-movie star married to Madeline (Mandy Moore), the spoiled rich daughter of a powerful senator. Boxer turns up near the beach in L. A. suffering from complete amnesia; he’s watched by a military sniper named Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake), who also narrates the film and seems to hold the key to the mystery of what happened to Santaros in the desert that caused his mental breakdown. Meanwhile, Santaros falls for activist porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) as radical anti-government forces led by Cyndi Pinziki (Nora Dunn) plot a huge terrorist event to take place on the Fourth. Add in a police officer (Seann William Scott) who may be the link between all the other characters, and you’ve got the gist of the story. Unfortunately, there are easily 10 other characters wandering around in this mishmash of a plot, played by everyone from Miranda Richardson, John Larroquette and Christopher Lambert to Wallace Shawn, Kevin Smith, Jon Lovitz and Bai Ling, and not one of them seems to have a clue as to what is actually going on--which is exactly how the audience watching feels, too.

Acting
It is a mystery how so many usually talented actors stumbled into this incoherent mess of a movie, much less how they have all succeeded in giving some of the worst performances of their careers. Dwayne Johnson, the usually likable wrestler-turned-actor, leads the pack, resorting to rolling his eyes and twitching his fingers to portray a man in emotional distress. Sarah Michelle Gellar is equally abysmal; her ridiculous porn-star/talk-show-host character comes off as a complete caricature, not a characterization. Miranda Richardson simply chews the scenery, and Wallace Shawn actually does a caricature of himself, which is just weird. It is no wonder that when this inane flick debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, people booed and walked out. The shock is that Sony coughed up more money for special effects and a re-edit--perhaps that is because there are so many well-known names on the cast list? Whatever the reason, the still two-and-a-half-hour film is so jumbled, enervating and downright boring that we’re pretty certain you’ll be tempted to head for the bathroom and never come back. The only thing that might keep you interested is if you have a Bai Ling fetish (although why you would pick her to obsess over is a complete mystery); she spends the movie vamping it up in costumes that make her look like the porn star, instead of Gellar.

Direction
Writer-director Richard Kelly had a cult hit with Donnie Darko, which apparently made him believe that there is a market for movies that are incredibly incoherent and lacking in the most basic narrative focus. Sadly, he’s made just that movie with Southland Tales; in fact, he explains himself in three graphic novels and a large Web site, the prequel to the movie that we apparently should have investigated beforehand since the film is supposed to be the last three chapters of the saga. But therein lies the rub, as no filmmaker should assume that moviegoers will have taken the time to do those things before entering the theater. For anyone who has not embraced this self-involved filmmaker’s other work, Southland Tales simply comes across as a mixed-up jumble of half-baked ideas performed by actors who look like they are involved in a high school video project, not a bona fide Hollywood movie. And if the steady stampede for the door during the screening we sat all the way through is any indication, this is a movie that will have patrons who have actually paid for the experience considering a quick sneak away into a different movie in the multiplex. Lord knows that only someone who is paid to watch would actually sit through this whole film. After all, those are two hours and 24 minutes of life that we will never get back.

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