Movie Review - 'Southland Tales'

Southland Tales

Starring Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Seann William Scott
Directed by Richard Kelly
Rated R

Director Richard Kelly spent half a decade crafting Southland Tales, the follow-up to his breakthrough debut, Donnie Darko. He'll never be given that much time to work on a movie again.

And based on the finished result, nor should he. Southland Tales is an unfailingly bizarre and idiosyncratic film, which is fine on its own, but this movie actually punishes you for its strange nature by keeping secret what little explanation it offers for far too long.

It's an aggressive move, though, for any filmmaker to present an alternate reality, which is what Kelly does in the opening minutes of Southland Tales, and what he does best here. With the Iraq War spinning out of control, a nuclear attack in Texas in 2005 begins a chain of events that culminates on July 4, 2008, but if a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, where should we begin for this chain of events?

It does very little good to expand on the characters in Southland Tales, other than to say three of them are most important for the purposes of moving the story along: Former action movie star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson), who has unwittingly found himself in a resistance movement; police officer Roland Tolliver (Seann William Scott), for reasons we can't reveal; and pornstar Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), whose surprising views on politics are making her a bigger celebrity than her energy drink.

The plot is so circuitous - Kelly desperately wants to keep you from figuring too much out, but at the sake of a cohesive story where we feel we know our bearings - and the minor characters so preening and superfluous, that Southland Tales quickly devolves into, well, a wankfest for a director who lost his way.

The effects look great, but the actors do not. Instead, they speak and move with trepidation, not because the script calls for it but because their instincts are that the next step they take as actors isn't logical. Kelly creates a fantastic world for them to inhabit but doesn't give anyone a reason to live in it or live period... and with a possible apocalypse around every corner in his world, that may not be such a bad thing.

I've heard that if you read the graphic novel Kelly wrote years earlier that it clears up a lot of questions. Here's the problem: People shouldn't have to do that. If Kelly's a great filmmaker, he can explain it with his movie and his movie alone. He hasn't done that. Those are the rules. I don't have to read the Harry Potter books to get the movies.

Additionally, if the purpose of Southland Tales is to keep you from getting your bearings, why provide 15 minutes of backstory at the beginning of the movie? He presents a scenario in the opening act that he can't make work in the remaining 90 minutes. It happens. But only to bad movies.

This is a remarkably bloated, endlessly frustrating film that may serve Richard Kelly just fine, but it doesn't do itself or the audience any favors.