This would be the Oliver Stone movie no one talks about. That's because Stone's fans find nothing here to praise and criticizing U Turn is a bit like kicking a crippled puppy; easy but ultimately unsatisfying. The film starts out with Sean Penn looking remarkably like singer k. d. lang and just goes downhill from there. It's mannered, uneven, empty and tiresome. For a filmmaker who has made many bold and controversial choices in his career, U Turn is Stone's brain fart. I don't think even he could explain what the hell he was doing here.
Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn) is a city boy with hair like Elvis driving through the Arizona dessert in a red convertible with a bag full of money and two fingers cut off his left hand. His car breaks down in the dirt poor town of Superior, leading Bobby to encounter
1. A bizarro white trash mechanic named Darrell (Bill Bob Thornton) whose oddness is only exceeded by his uncleanliness. 2. A caramel-colored temptress named Grace (Jennifer Lopez) whose mangled heart and soul are as obvious as a 100 foot tall, flashing neon sign that says "This Bitch Will Cut Off Your Penis". 3. Grace's crotchety and strangely toothed-husband Jake (Nick Nolte) who is old enough to be her grandfather and reminds me of an old timey prospector who went crazy looking for gold and ended up having sex with his mule. 4. Local sheriff Virgil Potter (Powers Boothe), who seems like the only normal person in the whole story until he too become a blubbering nutcase toward the end. 5. A blind, old Indian panhandler (Jon Voight. No, I'm not kidding. It's Jon Voight) whose philosophical musings sound like the transcripts of a bull session at a college dorm after a night of too much beer, too much weed and not enough women. 6. Toby and Jenny (Juaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes), teenage sweethearts who act like they just stepped out of a time capsule from 1953 and immediately snorted a big bag of crack.
The story is about whether Bobby will kill Grace for the money Jake promises him or will he kill Jake for the money Grace says he has hidden in his safe. There's also something about Bobby needing money to pay off a bookie/loan shark, but that gets discarded like a used tissue. Basically, Sean Penn just sort of wanders around while supposedly kooky and clever things happen around him.
There are a very few moments in U Turn that are not painful to watch. That's when Bobby acts like a normal guy that's gotten stuck inside a bad, community theater rendition of a Tennessee Williams play. Those moments are very brief, however, and the rest of the movie is like waiting to pass a kidney stone.
I could go on and on about how U Turn haphazardly veers from attempts at David Lynchian creepiness to stabs at vaudevillian comedy to imitations of world weary musings to pathetic invocations of film noir. I could dwell on how the actors all seem like they're in different movies. I could delve into how the script's overly deliberate effort at being unusual actually produces nothing but boredom. But none of that truly defines the opprobrious nature of this film. Yeah, that's right. I used the word opprobrious. U Turn forced me to bust out the thesaurus to adequately describe it.
No, what illustrates the extreme suckitude of this movie is the unending barrage of visual tic, tricks and shtick that Stone staples throughout it. Almost every technique and digression of camera work and editing that you can imagine is presented here without any of it having coherence or cogency. Yup. Thesaurus again. Listing all of Stone's distracting and aggravating nonsense would sap my will to live, so I'll just give you one example of the filmmaking he's doing here. In this movie, Stone is fixated on close ups of eyes and lips the way Quentin Tarantino is obsessed with feet.
Oliver Stone has become a little caricatured and clichéd for always taking on huge, provocative subjects in his work. Well, he needs to go right on telling grand stories about grander issues because U Turn proves that when Stone abandons relevance and significance to grasps at simple entertainment, it's like watching the guy who finishes last in a hot dog eating contest. It's gauche and doesn't amount to anything.
Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn) is a city boy with hair like Elvis driving through the Arizona dessert in a red convertible with a bag full of money and two fingers cut off his left hand. His car breaks down in the dirt poor town of Superior, leading Bobby to encounter
1. A bizarro white trash mechanic named Darrell (Bill Bob Thornton) whose oddness is only exceeded by his uncleanliness. 2. A caramel-colored temptress named Grace (Jennifer Lopez) whose mangled heart and soul are as obvious as a 100 foot tall, flashing neon sign that says "This Bitch Will Cut Off Your Penis". 3. Grace's crotchety and strangely toothed-husband Jake (Nick Nolte) who is old enough to be her grandfather and reminds me of an old timey prospector who went crazy looking for gold and ended up having sex with his mule. 4. Local sheriff Virgil Potter (Powers Boothe), who seems like the only normal person in the whole story until he too become a blubbering nutcase toward the end. 5. A blind, old Indian panhandler (Jon Voight. No, I'm not kidding. It's Jon Voight) whose philosophical musings sound like the transcripts of a bull session at a college dorm after a night of too much beer, too much weed and not enough women. 6. Toby and Jenny (Juaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes), teenage sweethearts who act like they just stepped out of a time capsule from 1953 and immediately snorted a big bag of crack.
The story is about whether Bobby will kill Grace for the money Jake promises him or will he kill Jake for the money Grace says he has hidden in his safe. There's also something about Bobby needing money to pay off a bookie/loan shark, but that gets discarded like a used tissue. Basically, Sean Penn just sort of wanders around while supposedly kooky and clever things happen around him.
There are a very few moments in U Turn that are not painful to watch. That's when Bobby acts like a normal guy that's gotten stuck inside a bad, community theater rendition of a Tennessee Williams play. Those moments are very brief, however, and the rest of the movie is like waiting to pass a kidney stone.
I could go on and on about how U Turn haphazardly veers from attempts at David Lynchian creepiness to stabs at vaudevillian comedy to imitations of world weary musings to pathetic invocations of film noir. I could dwell on how the actors all seem like they're in different movies. I could delve into how the script's overly deliberate effort at being unusual actually produces nothing but boredom. But none of that truly defines the opprobrious nature of this film. Yeah, that's right. I used the word opprobrious. U Turn forced me to bust out the thesaurus to adequately describe it.
No, what illustrates the extreme suckitude of this movie is the unending barrage of visual tic, tricks and shtick that Stone staples throughout it. Almost every technique and digression of camera work and editing that you can imagine is presented here without any of it having coherence or cogency. Yup. Thesaurus again. Listing all of Stone's distracting and aggravating nonsense would sap my will to live, so I'll just give you one example of the filmmaking he's doing here. In this movie, Stone is fixated on close ups of eyes and lips the way Quentin Tarantino is obsessed with feet.
Oliver Stone has become a little caricatured and clichéd for always taking on huge, provocative subjects in his work. Well, he needs to go right on telling grand stories about grander issues because U Turn proves that when Stone abandons relevance and significance to grasps at simple entertainment, it's like watching the guy who finishes last in a hot dog eating contest. It's gauche and doesn't amount to anything.