Written by Vickie
February 05, 2010
I’m pretty sure this meandering, directionless and poorly written comedy (?) will wind up as one of the worst films I see in 2010.
On paper, it sounds promising: Steve Buscemi stars as John, a claims investigator for a New Mexico insurance company, who suffers through a series of bizarre and surreal encounters in Sin City when he’s sent on assignment by his somewhat shifty boss (Peter Dinklage). John is teamed with a steely, tough-guy partner named Virgil (Romany Malco), and the duo find themselves battling nudists, negotiating with a human torch (John Cho), probing the legitimacy of a neck-brace-wearing stripper (Emmanuelle Chriqui) confined to a wheelchair, and doing business with a ne’er-do-well named, wait for it, Lou Cipher. (Get it? Get it? Ahahahaha!)
On screen, however: not so much.
Unfortunately for all involved, the movie makes no sense, has no discernable arc and seems to be just one pointless, awkward vignette after another. I know that sometimes making a left-of-center indie film that defies cinematic convention(s) can work out brilliantly (for example, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but this isn’t one of those films.
In John, writer-director Hue Rhodes gives the audience someone weird, but someone without any clear purpose or direction. What does John want? Why is he on this journey? Who knows. He’s not even particularly likable or sympathetic... just annoying. In fact, so are all the characters – there’s not a single person onscreen for whom the audience might want to root. The men are all crazy, and the women are all relegated to T&A set dressing. And, if the sole purpose of the story is simply to illustrate a really strange couple of days in John’s life, then it really should have made that strangeness far more interesting and much more creative.
Buscemi and his co-stars try their best to plod through the leaden dialogue and unfunny material, but they are done in by the molasses-like pacing, the absurdity of what their characters are being asked to do, and the endless chain of drawn-out sequences (a “lap dance” featuring Chriqui’s stripper is particularly awful) that, ultimately, go absolutely nowhere.
And that’s a lot of suckage in a movie that’s already barely 90 minutes long.
