Review of Southland Tales

Introduction

`Southland Tales`, if you didn`t know, is director Richard Kelly`s follow-up to the critically acclaimed `Donnie Darko`. It`s also the film Richard Roeper (of Ebert and Roeper) called "two hours and twenty-four minutes of abstract crap". Which would certainly make for an interesting, not to mention brave, tagline.

Kelly originally brought a longer cut of his futuristic satire to Cannes in 2006 where - and this may not be true at all - it had those delicate film critics throwing up in the aisles. It certainly met with an overwhelming negative reception, and was shelved while Kelly got the scissors out, tinkered around in the editing room and produced a slightly leaner, apparently more coherent version which originally hit UK cinemas in December of last year, presumably after blowing several pounds of dust off the film can.

Set in an alternate 2008 where the War on Terror has escalated into the beginnings of a third great war, the US has been turned into a paranoid, Orwellian megastate after nuclear attacks on two Texan cities. Protected by the shroud of The Patriot Act, the newly-formed USIDent agency keep totalistic tabs on the citizens, while buoyed by the fever of revolution, the underground neo-Marxist movement looks to bring an end to the era of the capitalist pig by using blackmail and murder to manipulate the outcome of the upcoming presidential election. Acting as pawns caught between the two groups are amnesiac action hero Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson), his lover and repentant porn empress Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Urban Police Unit officer Roland Taverner and his twin brother Ronald (Seann William Scott) and a battle-scarred, bible-quoting soldier named Pilot Abeline (Justin Timberlake), all caught in a manipulative contest for the future of a new, tide-based fuel source called Fluid Karma.

Video

The DVD we received had `property of Universal Pictures` emblasoned across the screen at regular intervals, and in the interest of the site`s unofficial party line of not reviewing the technical merits of studio screeners, I`ll say "no comment".

Audio

Audio tracks on most screener discs of this sort have a fairly close to final version of the sound present, but here the Dolby Digital 5.1 is encoded at the surprisingly low bitrate of 384kbps, so I`m going to assume this isn`t to be the case in the retail release. What won`t change, however, is the fantastic use of licensed music and the cracking score from electronica mastermind Moby.

Features

When you click through to the bonus features, you`re presented with just a lonely looking `making of`, which runs for about half an hour and is actually quite an interesting watch. Richard Kelly has declined to have any involvement with this initial DVD due to time constraints, but hey, look out for the director`s cut with a whole [insert small number] minutes of extra footage and a droll commentary hitting shelves near you in 2009!

Conclusion

Envisioned as a political satire based in an alternate future but with real world events shaping the issues, `Southland Tales` is an incongruous mess of ideas, a flashy pastiche of Lynchian ambition, glib irony and storytelling shortcomings. Assembling the oddest ensemble ever committed to celluloid, the film`s narrative is far too frenzied to follow lucidly for its length, and its superflous approach to characterisation and black comedy threatens to, and eventually does, overpower the ideological statement of Kelly`s satrical ode to Altman. For all its machinations as a soapbox to convince a post 9/11 society to look inwards at itself and smell the zeitgeist, it just doesn`t click into place as a working movie, despite how entertaining it can occasionally be.

While there are brief flashes of genius, these generally appear as picture-to-music sense assaults - including a full-blown rock opera moment backed by The Killers` `All The Things I`ve Done` - clearly tracing pages ripped straight out of `Donnie Darko`, albeit on a grander scale, sans the solid plot to back it up. Kelly`s tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the neo-Marxists as pot-smoking liberals and jaded, delusional celebrities and the USIDent as neo-con harvesters of sorrow is an early highlight, but it eventually succumbs to its own weight of aspiration, its knees buckling once and for all at the last hurdle in a climax that`s akin to watching someone else`s waking dream. While its fans will champion it as a flawed masterpiece, and it`s certainly succeptible to acclaim of the "it`s long, it`s topical and I didn`t understand it, so it must be good" variety, it`s inaugural outing on DVD clears up any misunderstanding over whether the 2006 Cannes cut of `Southland Tales` was simply underdeveloped and unpolished, or fundamentally broken.