Southland Tales film review

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SOUTHLAND TALES

When Richard Kelly premiered his follow-up to the cult smash Donnie Darko at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival it was called a career-killer. The reception for the three-hour work was so bad - and the Croisette knows how to do hostility - that the screening has gone down in recent film history. All those who were not present learnt was that Kelly's post-apocalyptic satire was a confused mess which rambled incoherently and left audience members stunned.

Eighteen months have passed and Kelly has retooled his film and edited it down to a more palatable two hours and twenty minute version. The trouble is that, even at this relatively slimline length, it's still a rambling and incoherent mess.

Part of the problem is that the film is actually only a section of Kelly's greater vision for Southland Tales: the first three instalments were published as a graphic novel, which cinema audiences are unlikely to have read. To be fair, Kelly does make an effort to bring viewers up to speed with an introduction that outlines an America in fear in 2008: nuclear attacks have killed thousands and enforced even greater security restrictions, and more worryingly gas supplies have run out. Armed patrols roam the streets and the presidential election is imminent.

The first five minutes are as clear as it gets though. Once the characters come into view logic and sense go out of the window. Dwayne Johnson plays a movie star who may or may not have amnesia and who may or may not have fallen through a space time continuum in the Californian desert. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a porn star who sings about teen horniness, while Justin Timberlake is a renegade soldier looking to take potshots from Santa Monica's pier. All of this is narrated by Timberlake with heavy doses from the Book of Revelations.

This is only scratching the surface: plenty of other characters drift in and out, variously played by the likes of Christopher Lambert, Miranda Richardson, Seann William Scott, Bai Ling and Wallace Shawn. What purpose they serve is impossible to explain, and as time goes on the viewer is left mesmerised by the sheer folly of it all. It's astonishing that Kelly got the money to finance it and that he then went ahead and actually made it. The result is one of the decade's most baffling films.

Paul Hurley