U-TURN (66)

Directed by: Oliver Stone

Starring: Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight

The Pitch: An obnoxious big-city hustler drifts into the small town of Superior, Arizona when his car overheats on a remote desert road.

Theo Sez: A two-thirds terrific joke, made in the same style of exhausting, delirious excess as NATURAL BORN KILLERS - colours saturated, images over-exposed, action repeated from different angles, people's voices heard without their lips moving. It's exhilarating but above all perverse, deliberately taking away anything we can hold on to, leaving only anarchy - which fits in nicely with Stone's jaundiced take on modern times. Like BLUE VELVET (only more crudely and belligerently) it invests its hellhole of a setting with Norman Rockwell trappings - old men pitch horseshoes or philosophise in the diner, young bucks worry about their girlfriends' "honour", billboards proclaim that "Jesus is Lord", 50s ballads float over the action : for all its larkiness (and its little in-jokes, like the sign that reads "Re-Elect Rutowski for City Council" - Richard Rutowski, an old crony of Stone's, is the film's co-producer), this is also a return to this director's eternal theme, America's loss of innocence, drug-addled perversity eating away at the husk of small-town verities. The trippy, chaotic style is Stone's version of what the 60s felt like as they exploded out of the small-town 50s ; fortunately (for those wondering what all this has to do with the 90s), it's also a riot of feverish imagery, as well as a gleeful side-swipe at the ultra-tight, anal-retentive plotting of most neo-noirs - you could say this bears the same relation to BLOOD SIMPLE or RED ROCK WEST as Altman's LONG GOODBYE does to the 1944 FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. It's the grand-cosmic-joke view of Life, with a suitably sarcastic style and Ennio Morricone's spring-loaded score boing-boinging happily over the murderous proceedings. Unfortunately, it goes on too long ; at 85 minutes it might've been some kind of gonzo classic.