Summary:
A man heading to Vegas to pay off his gambling debt is waylaid in a strange Arizona town where everything goes wrong.
My Thoughts:
Note: As I sit down to write this review, I’m not sure if I’ll give it a 2.5/5 or a 3/5; it teetered on the edge of decent and bad for so much of it’s runtime that I honestly don’t know what to say about it, so, we’ll see if I’ve decided by the end of this review (writing my thoughts out usually helps to solidify how I feel).
I’ve never really been a huge fan of Oliver Stone, but there are a few films I can tolerate (“Platoon” is good; “Born on the Fourth of July” is decent but it feels really long; I actually really enjoy “Natural Born Killers”, but I don’t think it’s a great film). I watched this film on a recommendation; I didn’t know anything about it going in.
There are a lot of things I liked about this movie- the story in general; the weird, almost ‘Twin Peaks’ feel of the town and some of the characters; the frenetic feeling of some sequences; most of the acting. But there are a lot of other things that drove me bonkers- Jennifer Lopez’s (“The Cell”) acting; the action scenes (wherein the camera reeled about like a drunk, refusing to stay still long enough for me to see what was really going on); the sexualizing of incest; and some of the odd stylistic choices (occasional black and white shots for no apparent reason; random grain added to the film in certain parts; music-video style editing); and the fact that Sean Penn (“The Professor and the Madman”) stars one of the sleaziest and most unlikeable protagonists I’ve seen him play (and he’s played a lot of sleazeballs).
As a whole, I think I would have enjoyed this film more if it weren’t under the direction of Oliver Stone. I think Stone is fine (at best), but his style of filmmaking when it comes to approaching the weird things in life seems to be, “Let’s make this as weird as possible. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make any sense or further themes.” This movie thrives on weirdness; as I mentioned above, the town where Penn is stranded feels akin to Twin Peaks, where the characters are bizarre and what they do is even more so. The thing is, when Lynch approaches weirdness, there’s always a reason for it. You think the Log Lady is just there just to be weird? No, she represents something, and though you might not fully comprehend what, you get the general sense that she knows something about the trees and the owls who are not what they seem. Oliver Stone’s town is populated with people that behave oddly, but their personalities don’t hint at a bigger metaphorical picture, they just confuse the storyline, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.
Another problem I had with this movie was that Penn’s character did nothing to make me care about him. There’s nothing wrong with unlikeable characters (see “Uncut Gems”), but those unlikeable characters have to be compelling enough that I want to follow them to their journey’s end. There’s a cliché in filmmaking where you give your protagonist a ‘Save the Cat Moment’- a moment where the protagonist goes out of their way to do something nice that lets the viewer attach themselves to that character. In this film, Penn legit runs over a cat with his car during the opening credits of the film; Stone is hitting us over the head with the fact that his character will be an unlikeable antihero (cue my eye roll). From there, Penn’s character tries to sleep with a teenage Jenifer Lopez after meeting her on the street; he’s sort of pushy about the whole thing too, and the film implies that his pushiness is not a bad thing, but a good thing, something that turns Lopez on; in today’s post #MeToo culture, that sort of content feels gross and weird.
Though I couldn’t have cared less about the characters or directing as a whole, I still actually kind of enjoyed this story because you never really know what’s going to happen next. It tells the hectic story of a bunch of crazy people all trying to work through their issues and steal a ton of money before getting the heck out of dodge. There are tons of back stabbings and double-crossings, hidden relationships and back-stories that have sway over the current storyline. It’s a twisted ride, and you never really know where it will end (until the last fifteen minutes, and then it becomes sort of drawn out).
Verdict:
So, in the end, I decided to give this a 2.5/5 star rating. It’s not horrible, but the more I think about it, the less impressed I am with it. Maybe Oliver Stone’s gonzo style will work better for you than it did for me, but I found this movie to be a harried attempt to convey explosive mania; it half worked, it half didn’t, and in the end I felt nothing and will probably remember very little of this movie in years to come.
End Note: I didn’t like this particular recommendation, but we at TMM are more than willing to review anything you guys throw at us! So please, write in and tell us what to watch! We’re always looking for more movies!
Review Written By: