A year and a half after it premiered to boos at the Cannes Film Festival, Richard Kelly’s sci-fi fantasy/political satire “Southland Tales” finally detonates in US theaters on its way to DVD. If a more incoherent and self-indulgent movie has been released so far this century, I’m not aware of it.
Kelly’s only previous effort, “Donnie Darko,” is a model of narrative clarity and artistic discipline compared to this sprawling mess, which contains some of the worst acting and dialogue in memory.
The setting is mostly Southern California, which has become a “1984”-style police state after a 2008 terrorist attack in Texas that may or may not have disrupted the space-time continuum.
There are surveillance cameras everywhere, including restroom stalls. The Internet is controlled by a quasi-governmental agency headed by the wife (Miranda Richardson) of a senator (Holmes Osborne, who played Donnie’s dad) running for president.
The narrative mostly revolves around Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson, who dropped “The Rock” from his name for this project), an amnesiac action-movie star who is married to the senator’s spoiled daughter (Mandy Moore).
Orbiting Santaros like so many runaway satellites are his mistress, a porn star turned TV pundit (Sarah Michelle Gellar); an LAPD cop and his twin brother, an Iraq war veteran (both played by Seann William Scott); and the leader of a band of “Neo-Marxist” rebels (Amy Poehler).
The huge cast also includes Zelda Rubinstein (the height-challenged medium from “Poltergeist”), John Larroquette, Kevin Smith – and Justin Timberlake, as another Iraq veteran who lip-syncs a production number and provides intermittent, unhelpful narration.
Many of these performers are (understandably) hiding behind extensive wigs and makeup. The most grotesque and unrecognizable is Wallace Shawn, cast as a German baron who unveils his alternate energy source at a party in a dirigible over Los Angeles.
Normally, I’d cut a little slack to any movie that quotes something as obscure as Cecil B. DeMille’s musical “Madam Satan,” as well as scores of better-known movies, from “The Manchurian Candidate” to “Duck Soup.”
But spending $12 and 2½ hours (30 minutes less than the Cannes cut) on something as aggressively bad as “Southland Tales” is not something I can recommend with a clear conscience.
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SOUTHLAND TALES
Apocalypse No.
Running time: 145 minutes. Rated R (profanity, violence, sex, drugs). At the Empire, the Angelika, the First and 62nd.