Review: U-Turn (1997) Rating: 2.0 stars (out of 4.0)
A movie review by David Sunga ******************************** Key to rating system: 2.0 stars Debatable 2.5 stars Some people may like it 3.0 stars I liked it 3.5 stars I am biased in favor of the movie 4.0 stars The movie has personal impact or stands out *********************************
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Written by: John Ridley (based on the John Ridley novel ‘Stray Dogs')
Starring: Sean Penn, Jennifer Lopez , Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, Joaquin Phoenix, Billy Bob Thornton, and Claire Danes
Ingredients: down and out gambler guy whose car breaks down, frustration, remote town in Arizona, sleazy women looking for a free ticket out of town, lecherous underintelligent hillbillies, redneck police
Synopsis: In this a dark comedy Bobby (Sean Penn) is driving to Vegas to pay off a gambling debt when his Mustang convertible breaks down in a backwards Arizona desert town. Through huge coincidences, Bobby loses all his money and means of transportation. In town he meets an assortment of annoying and exaggerated backwater creeps: violent unintelligent men and sleazy women. For example, Jake McKenna (Nick Nolte) is an incestuous lunk who wants Bobby to murder his daughter/wife Grace. Meanwhile his wife Grace McKenna (Jennifer Lopez) is a mentally unstable woman who promises to run off with Bobby if he murders her husband. How can Bobby get out of there before he goes nuts?
Opinion:
Although the cinematography is great and the performance of the cast members is strong, it's not enough to overcome two things which are poisonous to most moviegoers: unsympathetic protagonists, and the depressing message that life consists of inescapable suffering.
In 1917 the famous artist Marcel Duchamp signed a men's urinal and submitted it as artwork to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists -- the idea, I guess, being that it was the job of the modern artist to shake things up and make the audience look at ordinary things a new and different way. To me, Oliver Stone is the film director version of that mentality. Here he takes an old action plot (adventurer gets stuck in a hellish hick town), and retools it as a dark comedy set in the West that preaches a morbid existential message: that life consists of inescapable suffering.
Okay as art. But the difference between conventional art and a good movie is that in a good movie the audience is supposed to identify with and care about what happens to the characters. Aside from the ultimately depressing existential theme, the central weakness of ‘U-Turn' is that its characters are colorful, but so disloyal and disgusting that the audience doesn't really care what happens to them by the end of the movie.
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