Review of Southland Tales (2007) by Timg. — 08 Jun 2008

What. The. Hell. I'm going to be honest, I only watched the first hour, so if this film exploded into a mass of coherent plot and storyline after this point, then I apologise. But I had to turn it off because I was getting genuinely angry with it.

The film starts with some sort of nuclear attack seen through a camcorder at a garden party, and I thought then that the film could be great - just my thing, but I was so wrong. The next thing we know, we're in the not so distant future, but a future that looks like the year 3000.

There didn't seem to be a reason for that. Characters appeared randomly without explanation, The Rock is apparently an actor who needs to drive around with some cop, while his porn star girlfriend (Sarah M-G) rambles about some premonition for the future.

Why did Rock need to drive around with him? Who knows, because it wasn't deemed important enough to explain. Was the country in a state of nuclear war? Again, no idea, because an hour in all we'd seen was one explosion in the first minute.

The only hint that they might have been at war was all the nice shiny metal things, and fancy computers. I was left with no idea who any of the characters were, what they were doing, why they were doing it, or how any of them had anything to do with a nuclear war.

My assumption was that Justin Timberlake was shoved in as a narraror because the story line was so weak that without him him it would have been nonsense. Unfortunately his part involved talking nonsense.

I want my hour back.