Call it Second Movie Syndrome… the unerring ability to follow up an auspicious debut with a right minger. We’ve already seen Darren Aronofski succumb to the potential pitfalls of SMS. Requiem For A Dream was a superb film that garnered much praise from the critics and an Oscar nomination for actress Ellen Burstyn; but his very next outing, The Fountain, was a great steaming pile of pretentious doggy do.
Now writer/director Richard Kelly, creator of the really rather wonderful Donnie Darko, steps up to bat and… oh dear! It’s happened again. He offers us Southland Tales, not so much a film as a random collection of oddball characters in search of a comprehensible storyline.
It’s usual in reviews like this to give a rough idea of the plot and I will try, God knows I will, but I’m not making any promises. Ahem. It’s the near future and America is at war with Iraq, Syria and North Korea (amongst others). Oil is in very short supply and a couple of nuclear bombs have been detonated in Texas. (We know all this because it’s explained by a pompous sounding narrator – in fact, much of the plot is explained this way, because if it wasn’t you’d have no chance of following it).
Popular movie star Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson, evidently too serious an actor now to be known simply as The Rock) has mysteriously disappeared and then reappeared in the company of porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Together they have written a ‘futuristic’ screenplay featuring a character called Jericho Kane. Santoros seems to have lost his memory. Meanwhile police officer Roland Tavernier (Seann William Scott), who may or may not be an identical twin or his own doppleganger, is trying to er… frame Santoros, in order to aid an underground resistance movement (I think) and a facially disfigured Iraq veteran (Justin Timberlake) shoots several people with a big gun and performs a rap song in an amusement arcade, for no apparent reason other than he’s Justin Timberlake. Oh yes, and Christopher Lambert is an arms dealer who drives around in an ice cream truck for no other purpose than to provide a suitable weapon to bring everything to its inevitable conclusion.
Watching Southland Tales convinced me of three things.
- Nobody is more convinced of Richard Kelly’s genius than Richard Kelly.
- This is no Donnie Darko.
- After wasting what must have been a considerable budget on this nonsense, Kelly is unlikely to get the chance to direct again.
What he has created here is a rambling, incoherent slice of pretentious nonsense that attempts to come across as profound, but merely makes you want to poke your eyes out with a blunt pencil. I managed to stay awake till the very end, only with great determination and possibly in the vain hope that the final reel would deliver a revelation that would make everything fall into place. It didn’t.
Needless to say I can’t recommend this to anyone except people suffering from insomnia and desperate for a cure.
