U-Turn (1997)

Director: Oliver Stone
Stars: Sean Penn, Jennifer Lopez, Billy Bob Thornton, Nick Nolte

Review:

This movie is really a gem to be discovered. Not many people knows and not many people appreicated. Roger Ebert called it a "repetitive, pointless exercise in film-making", for everyparts of it comes from somewhere. Yes the plot does bear quite resemblemence to Red Rock West (1994) starring Nick Cage, but the different focus, style and direction makes it an impressive movie in its own right.

The plot centers around a stranger to a new town, who meet a husband that wants to kill her wife and the wife who wants to kill the husband. While Red Rock West focuses on the plot, U Turn focuses on the town. The main character Bobby, played by Sean Penn, had his car broken in the middle of nowhere in a hurry to some business. He had to stop at a town, and a series of bad luck happens, while he get involved into the couple that wanted each other murdered.

The main attraction of this movie is the town. In the middle of nowhere, a burning sun, surrounded by eagles, waiting for you to die to eat your flesh. A road that leads out of town but kills you on the way without a mean of transportation, and a broken car. Moreover, this town is a trap, and everything in it is a trap. Every decision you make is a wrong one. Get your car fixed, wrong. Go to the grogery store for something to eat, wrong. Meet a beautiful girl, wrong. Buying a bum a Dr. Pepper, wrong. Playing a juke for a girl, wrong. Talking to that girl, wrong. Accepting a man's offer to kill his wife, wrong. It goes to a point that it is funny to see how much worse could it gets.

Sean Penn did a great job in acting a man slowing delving into madness and desperation. At first he got a attitude, then later bargained for the reward he deserves for murdering, and murders just for a ride out of the town. You can feel his frustration builds and builds, and saying the same "WTF" he said, and understand every move he took. The direction also provide a psychodelical feel, lesser but more realistic than in Stone's earlier work Natural Born Killers, that having you feel the heat of the desert, and made you wonder if it is the heat or you are going crazy.

This movie is one of those I would call a "journey movie". The protagonist goes through a journey, and you gained the experience. This one probably not the strongest piece from Oliver Stone, but I rate it higher than even Natural Born Killers.