Richard Kelly's alternate history, dark-comedy/drama Southland Tales is a big film with a lot of ambition. In fact, its too big for its own good. Full of edgy concepts and mind-bending plot, it plays out like a weird dream more than an actual coherent film.In a nutshell, Kelly mixes science fiction, political commentary and dark comedy in a story that takes place in southern California in an alternate universe where America suffered a nuclear attack and has quickly become a government-run police state.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson stars in the lead role as Boxer Santos, the son of a prominent politician. He has recently gone missing only to find himself in Los Angeles, his mind blank from a case of amnesia. Now he finds himself living with pornstar Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) who is reinventing herself as a television pundit. Together they are working on a screenplay. Boxer is busy researching the title character, Jericho Kane, which finds him teaming up with a policeman named Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott) and this is where things take a serious turn for the decidedly weird and confusing.
It is a point of fact that Southland Tales becomes so confusing that it is virtually impossible to know what is really happening until its final act, where finally the audience is able to glean that Boxer's amnesia is the result of a time travel phenomenon that also happened to involve Taverner (which explains why there are two of him running around). But in the meantime the film has also brought a second storyline into play that involves a company on the verge of a technological breakthrough that will break America's energy dependence on oil once and for all. It seems that a scientist has found a way to harness the energy of ocean waves. It all sounds too good to be true (it is) and for some reason the demonstration of this technology will usher in the apocalypse. It is up to Boxer to stop it.
Back up. Apparently the events of Boxer's screenplay are mirroring reality and now he is really IS the hero, not simply researching the role of one. The only problem is that none of this actually makes any sense at all! And in getting to this point we have encountered a cast that includes Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore, John Larroquette, Kevin Smith and roughly half of Saturday Night Live's alumni (Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Jon Lovitz, Ganeane Garafalo, etc). There are so many characters and so much going on that Southland Tales comes across as little more that schizophrenic. It is a mess.
Richard Kelly was the mind behind Donnie Darko, so the fact that this film was trying to be heady and think outside the box is not surprising. Watching it I got the feeling that I should somehow be taking more away from it, but the presentation just flat out didn't work and instead of thinking outside the box, Kelly simply over-filled it. As a result, the film never achieves focus and everything becomes irrelevant.
Kelly has said that this was intended as a dark comedy. With all of the obvious political commentary that permeates the film, that at least comes through loud and clear. Even so, I really wasn't entertained.
This film is completely confusing. Some films confuse but are still enjoyable despite that fact. Southland Tales is not and I recommend that you avoid it. You can easily find something more worthwhile to fill two hours. 3/10
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