Entertainment

‘Saint John of Las Vegas’ hardly a divine comedy

An indie road-trip movie that steers straight down Loser’s Lane, “Saint John of Las Vegas” stars Steve Buscemi as (what else?) a luckless nobody at an insurance company who gets a big chance for a promotion when he’s assigned to check out a possible fraud.

Buscemi is appealing as always, but the movie, which co-stars Romany Malco as Buscemi’s partner and Peter Dinklage as his boss on the case of a Las Vegas stripper suspected of faking a car wreck to win an insurance payoff, is only sporadically funny.

Among the most amusing scenes are an encounter with a nudist colony of rifle-toting cowboys and a chat with a carnival sideshow star who keeps bursting helplessly into flame. Yet these randomly flung-in episodes are just quirky padding around a thin, one-twist story.

Sarah Silverman isn’t given much to do as Buscemi’s unlikely love interest, an earnest simpleton obsessed with smiley-face novelty items. Asking Silverman to play an irony-free character is like asking John Wayne to do “Hairspray.”