It’s finally here, Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko (2001)! The highly anticipated Southland Tales is opening November 14th in select cities, November 16th wide and fans of the Director are wondering if it’s going to live up to the hype.
I’m going to attempt to encapsulate the story, excluding spoilers of course. It won’t be an easy task given how much story there is in this film and I’m not entirely sure I understood it all. It is 2008. Three years after a nuclear attack has destroyed Texas the American government has pretty much turned the nation into a police state. In the desert outside Los Angeles action star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) awakens to find he has no memory of who he is or how he got there. Returning to Southern California he joins up with an ex-porn star turned reality TV show host Kyrsta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and the pair write a script about how Santaros sees the end of the world happening.
What Santaros doesn’t realize is that he is the unwitting center of a complicated conspiracy that weaves through grass-roots terrorist groups, his father-in-law, an influential Senator with designs on the Presidency and a mysterious German technology tycoon. The people that seem to hold the key to all this are a police officer named Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), a former soldier in the Iraq War and his twin Ronald. Their reunion heralds a catastrophic disaster that could be the end of us all.
I’m going to come right out and be as blunt as I can about this: this movie fails miserably to meet the expectations put on it considering the cast and money to the production. The story is convoluted, preposterous and pretentious. For a sci-fi movie with a budget as big as this one was I was disappointed in the poor quality of some of the special effects.
The cast is extensive including Nora Dunn, John Larroquette, Miranda Richardson (who is sadly underused), Mandy Moore, an almost unrecognizable Kevin Smith and pop star Justin Timberlake as the film’s narrator. Comedians Amy Poehler and Cheri Oteri provide much of the edgy humor in the movie, though I would never classify the film as a comedy. Of the three central characters I enjoyed Sarah Michelle Gellar’s vapid Krysta the most. It’s about as far from Buffy the Vampire as you can get.
The film is actually the fourth installment in a series started as graphic novels. I can only assume that reading them prior to heading to the theater is probably helpful to understanding all of the intersecting story lines. But as viewers should we have to work that hard? After its disastrous “work-in-progress” premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 19 minutes were trimmed out and the final cut is now 2 hours and 24 minutes. Turns out the end of the world takes a while.
Running Time: 144 minutes
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