U-Turn
Still Lucky!
How much bad luck can one man accumelate, and how does he manage to unload all of it in one point of time?
In this whole movie, there isn't one single good character, talking in terms of morality rather than quality. The tricky thing is determening who's the least bad, and I think that honor goes to the blind beggarman played by Jon Voight, acting the part of backstory provider for the audience as well as a soundboard for our so called protagonist, played by Sean Penn. The beggarman is also my favourite character in the movie, spouting harsh words and pseudo-spiritual, native american-esque mumbo jumbo. And dragging around a dog he can seemingly bring back from the dead on a whim...so that's cool...I think?
As far as quality goes though, this has it in spades in the form off a very heavy-laden cast, including Billy-Bob redneck, Lawman Booth, sceeming Lopez, pederast Nolte and the esplodin' Phoenix. All of them are entertaining, if somewhat underused at times. Pheonix character is little more than a cameo, having two scenes and seemingly only to be in the movie to eat a ticket and stop Penn from enjoying a drink. While not Commodus levels of entertaining, he's enough of a fun element to justify being there and giving Penn someone to feel superior to.
Also, is this Liv Tyler's movie debue or something? She pops up for all of maybe 20 seconds, standing behind Penn in the line to buy a bus ticket and is then never seen again. It's such a wierd blink-and-miss-it thing that it must either be a cameo, or it's just her before
Armageddon and
Lord of the Rings.
Overall, it's an entertaining watch with more backstabbing and cross-scheming than any movie has a right to. It keeps you guessing throughout the movie, but my feeling is that if you'd come back to this movie, it won't be for the story itself, rather, you'd come back for the characters and to sit laughing at Penn for two hours. It's a hard, brutal, funny movie which I enjoyed, but I think it will be a while before I'll come back to it again.
A good and funny nom, Topsy!