Oliver Stone: U Turn (1997)

Bobby (Sean Penn) is a wounded drifter looking to make good on some bad bets.  His luck grows ever more bitter as some car troubles lead him into a dusty town on the edge of nowhere.  There a series of colorful townsfolk, including a deadpan mechanic (Billy Bob Thornton) and a troublesome couple (Claire Daines and Joaquin Phoenix), seem dead-set on keeping him in town.  He attracts the eye of local beauty Grace (Jennifer Lopez), who wants Bobby's body, and her husband Jake (Nick Nolte), who wants Bobby to kill Grace.  Oliver Stone's U Turn sees him taking a break from political film-making to try and work some genre magic.Oliver Stone reportedly said that U Turn was his attempt at making a movie he would have wanted to watch as a teenager. This makes sense only if, as a teenager, he drank a lot. The movie is a spectacular mess, a glorious display of badness the failure of which is enjoyable for not long enough to recommend. Stone seems to have made it in his free time, allowing scenes to be shot while he hung around the food table and recycling visual styles and narrative techniques from earlier films after the fact. The music, by legendary Ennio Morricone, perfectly encompasses the problems with the movie: it is hilariously disconnected and out-of-touch with the events on-screen, an element of form that intrudes on the viewing experience almost as much as Jennifer Lopez' acting.

The movie, we soon learn, is about Bobby, a former tennis pro on the run from some hard Vegas types who he owes money to. In an early flashback scene, we see his debtors cut off two of his fingers with garden sheers, followed by a shot reminding us that, tragically, Bobby will never again be able to throw a tennis ball straight up in the air for a serve. Here's an idea: if you want to make a sleazy, genre-level crime film, don't choose as your one subversive element making the protagonist a haunted tennis-playing gambler. Not unless you're also willing to twist the other archetypes to similarly absurd lengths.

Oliver. Man. Get out of your own goddamn way. The story here is cliché and predictable, but the actors are perfectly capable of elevating a slimy, lurid genre exercise into a piece of wonderful pulp entertainment—just let them do it. We're at a point where we don't need every frame and edit to remind us we're watching An Oliver Stone Production.

Thanks to the clueless direction, the movie plays like a circus where all the players are working on different acts. There's Nick Nolte, who is almost unable to fail in a role, and here he hams it up gloriously while wearing Dustin Hoffman's dentures from Hook. Sean Penn is, of course, perfectly good as a shambling drifter (though not so convincing as an ex-tennis pro). Billy Bob Thornton's character deserves his own movie at times.

But let's go back for a moment to the score, which sounds like it was recorded by the Looney Tunes ensemble. This is the one perplexingly, fascinatingly distinct thing about the film. U Turn seems like a disastrously extended version of something you may see on Funny or Die. If it were a 20-minute short, I would probably love it, because at that level I could believe it was an easy melodramatic send up of some genre conventions. At feature-length it's either a horrible miscalculation or a joke that overstays its welcome.