Review of U Turn (1997) by Darrin C — 04 Jan 2015

Maybe I just had the wrong mindset going into this movie. Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about. Though these things may be true, that does not change the fact that this is one of the few movies where I could honestly walk out of the movie theater and never look back. Every actor that wasn't Sean Penn gave an unbearably bad and poorly-written performance. The plot was 99% circumstantial and developed in this way constantly throughout the movie. Actually, now that I think about, the plot was so garbage that Oliver Stone actually took his horribly written characters and made them even WORSE by replacing character motivation with actions that progress his increasingly hard-to-follow plot. Now, there is nothing wrong with making the story hard to follow. But a story about a guy in debt traveling to a town where he decides to steal from a rich local should not be hard to follow. Ever. Under any circumstance. Unless time travel is involved.

But all of that stuff above is just me hating on the characters and story though. Right? The real reason people watch this movie is the stylized cinematographer. You see, movies with such strangeness surrounding it make many people think that there is something deeper beyond the surface. Movies like "Donnie Darko" and "It's Such a Beautiful Day" employ the use of strange imagery in order to tell their complex stories. This movie simply does it because it knows that there is NOTHING deeper than what is on the surface. The camera constantly spins around and jump-cuts to images of Christ, not because there is deeper, biblical undertone, but because the movie constantly tries to distract the audience from how fucking awful it is.

Now, if someone likes this film, it is 100% understandable. The movie is very weird, and some people get a lot of enjoyment out of that stuff. I may even recommend the film to fans of Sean Penn, who gives possibly the ONLY good performance in the film. That being said, I would undergo extreme caution when choosing to watch.

I give this film 1/5 stars, simply because Sean Penn's character constantly makes fun of how bad the movie he is in is.