Review: U Turn (1997)

Two years after Oliver Stone delivered his masterpiece, Nixon, the controversial director took a severe step back in the development of his film catalogue with this overblown ode to film noir. A film completely lacking coherence, U Turn is an exercise of style over substance that covers all the basic elements of a standard noir film: sexy femme fatales, double-crossing villains, twists of fate, and the eventual tragic ending. Yet despite a winning recipe, Stone completely blows it by telling a story so incomprehensibly over-the-top that the film ceases to be a story and spirals into an incoherent mess. There’s no attempt made to fully forming the characters so as to allow the audience a means of engaging with the story. I understand the concept that not all films have to have characters for the audience to sympathize with, especially in sordid crime films, but to completely ignore character development to present shallow constructs with only the sole purpose of delivering a generic plot is amateurish and downright insulting. The story (based on John Ridley’s novel Stray Dogs) starts off with petty criminal Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn), on his way to Las Vegas to pay the money he owes to some Russian gangsters. In the time-honored tradition of film noir, fate steps in and Bobby’s car has a meltdown, forcing him to pull into a small backwater town of Superior, Arizona. After leaving his car at a garage owned by dumb-eyed mechanic, played by the surprisingly effective Billy Bob Thornton, Bobby wanders the small town looking for a respite from the heat, and not surprisingly, he gets caught up in a plot to help the local tycoon businessman, Jake (Nick Nolte), murder his sexy young wife, Grace (Jennifer Lopez). That’s basically the plot. There’s nothing special about it and it’s typically succinct for a film noir. But Stone decides to twirl and swing his camera around for two hours in an effort to distract the audience from the lack of concrete direction and purpose. Sure there are some nice shots, courtesy of long-time Oliver Stone collaborator Robert Richardson, but after about 20 minutes of rapid cutting, changing film stocks, and odd camera angles, you can’t help but realize that Oliver Stone is not confident in simply telling the story as is; he doesn’t know that an effective film noir relies on not just an interesting setting and characters, but requires an ominous mood that hangs over the film, foreshadowing later events. The long list of top-notch actors in U Turn is also wasted. Most of the actors play two-bit roles, acting as extended cameo performances instead of actual characters, especially Claire Danes and Joaquin Phoenix as local village idiots. The fiery performance required of a proper femme fatale is utterly lost on Jennifer Lopez, who thinks that speaking in a faux Native American accent every now and then means character development, and ultimately the chemistry between Sean Penn and Lopez fizzles out almost from the beginning. In the end, Oliver Stone and company are just going through the motions, teasing the audience with a film filled with eye-candy but devoid of purpose, passion, or reason.

Richard Saad
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006