U TURN 1997
A film review by Timothy Voon
Copyright 1998 Timothy Voon
8 :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( for reaching the point of no return
Cast: Sean Penn, Jennifer Lopez, Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, Claire Danes, Joaquin Phoenix, Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Voight Director: Oliver Stone
There comes a unique moment in any bad movie, which redefines it as an outright awful movie. Unfortunately, we arrive at this point much too late or I would have left the theatre sooner. The line between good and poor taste is crossed, when it is revealed that a half-breed Indian girl (Jennifer Lopez), repeatedly raped by her father (Nick Nolte), decides to marry the beast even when he murdered her mother. In this most deranged arrangement, f'king the Sheriff (Powers Boothe) and a stray stranger (Sean Penn) somehow comes into play. With the help of the stranger, a succession of bullets and stabbings, murder and money is obtained. What follows is a further succession of pushing, strangling and death.
Some people will call this art, but I see it as pure lunacy.
What makes this movie particularly disappointing is the fact the director is Oliver Stone. After his fixation with the sixties and the NAM war and now this, one may wrongly accuse him of suffering from a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Get over it Oliver, we live in the nineties. No more, no more of this pent up ill will which seem to stain all your movies.
The plot takes place in the dead-beat town of Superior, Arizona. At first the quirky characters in the town and the unusual camera angles is reminiscent of NORTHERN EXPOSURE or RAISING ARIZONA. However, when the bizarre plot sets in, one begins to experience the TWIN PEAKS phenomena, before a plummeting straight to Hell.
Sean Penn is a wonderfully gifted actor and is unfortunately wasted as the non-too-bright stranger who can't seem to get out of town. Nick Nolte is surprisingly thin and haggard looking, but is otherwise well suited to the role of a murderous, incestuous bigot. Jennifer Lopez exudes all the charms of a sexually abused vixen, who is supposedly meant to be haunted by her abusers, but one would never guess it from all the hard on sex she's getting from her father, the sheriff and the stranger - she actually looks like she's enjoying herself?
My final comments are angry. Don't make a U TURN, don't even look back, keep on driving and miss this piece of trash cleverly disguised as cinema.
Timothy Voon e-mail: stirling@netlink.com.au http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Tim+Voon http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~bouclier/week/movies.html
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