My World of Flops Hardboiled and Soft-Headed Case File #203 U-Turn (1997)
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U-Turn is a bit of a tricky film for me to review because it’s based on a novel and a screenplay by John Ridley, the titular host of the poorly-rated, increasingly reputable basic cable movie review panel show Movie Club with John Ridley., which I’m sure you all remember from its record-breaking run in 2004 and 2005. The record? Least Popular Television Show in the History of the Universe.
A mere seventeen years ago, Ridley was my co-worker for thirteen surreal episodes on my first and undoubtedly final television show. I always liked him. He was smart and funny and had a very clear idea of who he was and what he wanted to do.
Like so many of the people in my professional life, Ridley has gone on to great things. I will never forget when he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 12 Years a Slave and strode onstage to accept the most prestigious and sought after award in screenwriting with a look that combined purpose and annoyance, an expression I remembered from the set of Movie Club with John Ridley.
He was perpetually aggravated by show-business despite his extraordinary success in multiple fields, particularly the way that his best known film projects at the time all involved his screenplays getting exhaustively re-written by arrogant white men.
That happened most famously and infamously with Three Kings, where he had to fight for a story credit after David O. Russell wrote the screenplay for his cult classic based on a brief summary of a script Ridley wrote.
Michael McCullers re-wrote much of Ridley’s screenplay for Undercover Brother despite not being a brother, undercover or otherwise. It will shock no one to learn that even though Ridley has three credits for U-Turn—for Executive Producer, screenplay and Stray Dogs, the novel the film is based on—Stone and frequent collaborator Richard Rutowski extensively re-wrote the script despite not being credited as writers.
Like Three Kings and Undercover Brother, U-Turn consequently does not represent Ridley’s creative vision so I very much doubt that he would be hurt that I dislike the movie for pretty much the same reason I dislike the vast majority of Stone’s films.
U-Turn marks a return to Stone’s days as a hot shot screenwriter, when he wrote hyper-macho pulp for American cavemen, lurid entertainment like Midnight Express, Conan the Barbarian, Scarface, Year of the Dragon and Eight Million Ways to Die.
Stone wasn’t trying to change the world or blow squares’ minds with those movies, merely entertain audiences with violence, racist stereotypes and cheap sensationalism.
The Great Auteur went back to being a vulgar entertainer with U-Turn but the truth is that Stone was never the great, Important Artist we deluded ourselves into thinking he was. He was always a cheap vulgarian who got lucky.
U-Turn casts Sean Penn as Bobby Cooper, a bad man fleeing an endless series of bad situations, some of which involve losing his fingers to people he owes money.
When his car breaks down in the ironically named Superior, Arizona, a circle of hell thinly disguised as a dusty small town in the middle of nowhere, the amoral drifter finds himself hopelessly stuck until he can raise the cold, hard cash necessary to liberate his flashy ride from cruel captor Darrell (Billy Bob Thornton), a belligerent half-wit who takes unseemly delight in our anti-hero’s unfortunate predicament.
Coated in a thick layer of dirt and grime that makes him look like a hillbilly version of Pigpen from Peanuts, Thornton delivers a performance of great quantity if not quality.
With the exception of Jennifer Lopez’s sexy and sad Grace, who is allowed to smolder as a femme fatale with a history of horrific physical, sexual and emotional abuse the movie is not remotely prepared to deal with yet seems turned on by all the same, everyone has been directed to go as big and broad as humanly possible.
In a role Stone wanted Marlon Brando to play, noted non-Native-American Jon Voight plays a blind Native American who may lack the power of sight but has insights into the world and its mysteries those gifted with sight do not.
It’s an expectorating, shouty, scenery-devouring caricature of a caricature that might be more appealing, or at least less obnoxious, if the other performances weren’t all operating on a similarly hyperbolic level as well.
Nick Nolte plays Jake, Grace’s evil husband as a cross between Chinatown’s Noah Cross and Dukes of Hazzard’s Boss Hog, a good old boy who is very bad in very predictable ways.
Tell it to the hand because the face ain’t listening!
Jake wants Bobby to kill Grace for a depressingly modest amount of insurance money. Grace wants Bobby to kill her husband for a small fortune he has stashed away. Bobby isn’t too proud or moral to commit murder; he just wants to make sure he doesn’t killed in the process.
A young Joaquin Phoenix costars as Toby N. "TNT" Tucker, a hot-headed youth with a rockabilly 1950s fashion sense and 1990s haircut. The misguided young man is in a tumultuous relationship with Claire Danes’ Jenny.
Their first moment onscreen together, it is all too apparent what the dynamic will be: Danes’ boy-crazy flirt will throw herself at any man unfortunate to cross her path and her impossibly jealous boyfriend will huff and puff and threaten before doing nothing.
Phoenix, Danes and Penn hit that one wobbly note of comic faux-cuckoldry immediately and then just keep hitting it over and over again. There’s no elevation, just the same woeful joke reported ad infinitum for scene after scene after scene.
That’s the film in a nutshell: it’s so undeservedly impressed with itself and its overblown sense of outrageousness that it does not seem to care that it’s limply re-heating Film Noir and hardboiled cliches.
It would be easier to forgive U-Turn if it were a tight 90 minutes. Alas, Oliver Stone does not make 90 minute movies, even when the genre angrily demands it so U-Turn lingers on for two shapeless, aimless, self-indulgent hours.
Stone may believe the road of excess leads to the path of enlightenment but here it just results in a pounding headache. There is never any tension because it is impossible to care about these monsters, with the exception of Lopez’s schemer, who is at once a victim and a victimizer, predator and prey. She deserves a better, more sensitive movie, one populated with human beings with real emotions, not cartoonish caricatures all competing to see who can give the biggest, most ostentatious performance.
U-Turn’s big twist will not come as a surprise to anyone who has seen Chinatown or read the first sentence of the film’s plot description on Wikipedia.
The sordid central twist is supposed to plunge the film and its characters into a darkness almost beyond human imagination but it instead rings hollow. It’s just another element of facile shock in a glorified b-movie already overflowing with shoddy sensationalism.
So while I dislike U-Turn I’m sure I don’t hate it half as much as its ostensible screenwriter probably does. To me it’s just another crappy Oliver Stone movie. For my Movie Club with John Ridley cast-mate, however the pain is undoubtedly both personal and intense.
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