BEFORE: After being cooped up in prison the last two nights, let's take this killing spree out on the road. Linking from "Stone", Robert De Niro was also in "We're No Angels" with Sean Penn (last seen in "All the King's Men"). And after "Stone" comes a film directed by Oliver Stone...
THE PLOT: A young punk drifter heading to Vegas to pay off his gambling debt to the Russian mafia is forced to stop in a Arizona town where everything that can go wrong, does.
AFTER: Honestly, this makes even less sense than "Stone" does, but it's got the opposite problem. Where "Stone" had not enough action, this film might have a bit too much. The end result is the same, it's tough to follow who's outsmarting who.
This one just has way too many reversals - times where a character appears to be working with another character, then it's revealed they're working against that person, or in league with someone else. These characters can spin on a dime, and do so frequently. At one point Sean Penn's working for the husband to kill the wife, and then later he's working with the wife to kill the husband. I won't reveal if he's successful either time, or who eventually comes out on top, because that represents what little enjoyment can be drawn from this film - who ends up walking away, and who ends up in the pile.
But very little here makes sense - even after all of the relationship secrets are revealed. Hey, at least the flashback scenes were minimal, so everything got told in (more or less) linear order. See, it's not that difficult to do so!
The highlight of the film for me was the interplay between Sean Penn's character and a backwoods mechanic played by Billy Bob Thornton, who keeps finding more work to do on the car, and keeps raising his rates every time his client tries to pick up the car. This part does make sense, at least to anyone who's ever had to get a car repaired - prices and time estimates become completely arbitrary.
But it adds to the ridiculousness, the impossibility of getting out of this Arizona desert town, where even the most casual conversations with strangers leads to accusations of infidelity and ensuing violence. Now, why would I want to visit Arizona?
Also starring Nick Nolte (last seen in "Mulholland Falls"), Jennifer Lopez (last seen in "The Cell"), Billy Bob Thornton (last seen in "Intolerable Cruelty"), Powers Boothe (last seen in "The Avengers"), Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "Signs"), Jon Voight (last seen in "The Manchurian Candidate"), with cameos from Bo Hopkins, Claire Danes (last seen in "How to Make an American Quilt"), Julie Hagerty (last seen in "Reversal of Fortune"), Laurie Metcalf (last seen in "Fun With Dick and Jane"), Liv Tyler.
RATING: 3 out of 10 vultures
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