Out on the edge, scavenging among 'Southland Tales'

November 16, 2007|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" isn't just a movie. It's an apocalyptic piñata that's been bazooka-ed open. The ideas are all fallen post-apocalyptic junk and treasure strewn about the ground, left for us to pick up and keep or toss like megaplex scavengers. Kelly, whose previous movie was "Donnie Darko," doesn't make it easy. The film is a fiasco whose B-side is a kind of visionary masterpiece (one being utterly, unfortunately inseparable from the other) that heaves about a dozen balls in the air nearly simultaneously and tries to levitate them all. It drops a few. He drops a few.

The year is 2008, and a presidential election is in the offing, three years after a lot of Texas was hit with a nuclear bomb. Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and Afghanistan pose a single mega-threat to the United States. The military draft has been reinstated, and the Patriot Act has mutated into an actual government agency called US-IDENT, which blissfully spies on us and censors Internet access. Miranda Richardson plays the head of the National Security Agency - she frequently sits in a big white control room and dresses like something out of Anne Rice.

Oh, yes: The planet is almost out of gas, too - biblically and from the standpoint of natural resources. So some daffy German scientists - represented by Wallace Shawn, who together with Beth Grant, Curtis Armstrong, and Zelda Rubenstein, as scientific kooks, seem like an old-old new wave band - have solved our energy crises with a perpetual motion machine powered by ocean currents. (It's ripped a hole in the fourth dimension, but otherwise it works.)

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), an action star with ties to the Republican Party (his father-in-law is a candidate for the White House), has disappeared in the desert and emerges with no memory of who he is. And Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the relapsed porn star with the topical chat show and hit single ("Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime"), has conscripted Boxer into a plot with neo-Marxist revolutionaries. The Marxists have kidnapped a cop and are forcing him to impersonate his revolutionary twin, both of whom are played by Seann William Scott.

I forgot to mention that Justin Timberlake, playing a disfigured Iraq war veteran, dolorously narrates the entire film. He sits at one of the turrets that overlook the city and gets a musical number. If you've been dying to see the man who brought sexy back strut around a game arcade lip-synching The Killer's "All These Things That I've Done" ("I've got soul/ But I'm not a soldier"), the wait is over.