Review of Southland Tales

Southland Snails

Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko came and went from theatres with little to no fanfare in the US, and didn't even get a theatrical release in Canada. With a wildly bizarre cast that includes the likes of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sean William Scott, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore, John Laroquette, Christopher Lambert, Zelda Rubenstien, Bai Ling, and Jon Lovitz, it was pretty obvious before I even sat down to watch SOUTHLAND TALES, that I was in for a complete mess. There's almost no way a great film with names like The Rock, Buffy, Stiffler, and J.T. is going to get swept under the rug otherwise. I had convinced myself otherwise though. I held out hope that it was going to be a minor masterpiece that people just didn't understand. Set in the not so distant future, where WWIII is underway, Johnson plays a famous actor who's married to the daughter of a senator who's gone mysteriously missing, only to return with amnesia. He's found by Gellar who plays a porn star and reality show host, who's married to drug dealer and porn producer, Will Sasso. Scott plays twins, one of whom is hired to impersonate the other by a group of Marxists, who've kidnapped the other, and want to implicate Johnson in a crime for blackmail purposes. All the while, Iraq veteran, Timberlake overlooks Southland from above in a computer opperated snipers chair + rifle with the ocean (which is being used as a teleportation device) to his back. And I know... That sounds like at least an interesting mess of movie, but I assure you that life is too short to give it your time. The first hour or so of the film is entertaining just for its quirkiness, but then it does nothing but try to be more and more convoluted and it just doesn't work. It becomes tedious, and the end doesn't come nearly as soon as the film promises all through its runtime by claiming that it's apocalypse. Kelly seems to have zero sense of pacing, and his films (especially this one) suffer terribly for it. Which is too bad because I really wanted this to be a gem. -jeff. whatsaninternet.blogspot.com

Posted on 03/09/08 by: Jeff. 06:37 PM