10/03/97
MOVIE REVIEW: U-Turn
'U-Turn' goes off the road

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

** (out of five)
Starring Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez, Billy Bob Thornton, Powers Boothe, Claire Danes, Joaquin Phoenix, Jon Voight, Julie Haggerty, Laurie Metcalf. A TriStar Pictures release written by John Ridley, directed by Oliver Stone. Rated R, contains violence, sex, nudity, profanity. Running time: 125 minutes.

Oliver Stone is back in his Natural Born Killers mode of candy-colored violence in U-Turn, a black comedy about a young man on the run who gets embroiled in murder plots when his car breaks down in a strange desert town.

It's a smaller film than certainly some of the paranoid epics that Stone has been associated with in recent years, what with JFK and Nixon. U-Turn is a film noir piece, although it was shot mostly in bright sunshine on grainy looking film.

John Ridley's script has a jealous wealthy husband named Jake McKenna (Nick Nolte) offering drifter Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn) enough cash to get out of town if he murders Jake's young wife (Jennifer Lopez) for insurance money. Then she makes a counter offer to Bobby to murder Jake for his hidden stash of cash. Its theme of double and triple crosses reminded me more than a little of the over-praised low-budget 1993 Nicolas Cage film Red Rock West. That was about a drifter who gets involved in husband-wife murder plots and double crosses in a small Wyoming town.

But Superior, Ariz., where the action of U-Turn takes place, clearly has more wacky characters per capita than any other place on Earth. Besides the husband-wife plotters there's a stalwart sheriff (Powers Boothe) who's too-quiet stance hides a big secret, a gooberish mechanic with rotted teeth (Billy Bob Thornton) who keeps upping the price of getting Bobby's car back on the road, a blind man (Jon Voight) and his dead dog, a nymphomaniac (Claire Danes) who tries to seduce Bobby in a diner, her wildly jealous boyfriend Toby N. Tucker (Joaquin Phoenix) who has TNT etched into his hair, plus assorted other crazies.

It's no wonder Bobby wants out of town. You will, too. This is one wacky saga. Bobby gets sucked farther and farther into the mess of it all as carefully laid plots get tripped up while Bobby figures out that he's not the casual murderer people would like him to be.

On the run from a loan shark, his money blown to smithereens in a one-of-a-kind shootout in a grocery store and everyone in Superior trying to get a little piece of him, it's no wonder Bobby is driven to near insanity. In the film's funniest scene he desperately pleads to get a bus ticket out of town from a determined ticket seller (Laurie Metcalf). But because Bobby is not having a very good day, even the ticket doesn't survive for long in the hurricane of nuttiness that swirls around him.

Will he find his way out of town and his place in the sun despite constant attempts to pummel his face into a bloody pulp? Actually, the bigger question of U-Turn is whether you will stick around long enough to find out. If you do, you'll be greeted by a protracted finale that's an ironic fitting to this huge black comedy. But though it's a neat wrap-up, you probably won't care too much by then about what has happened to any of the characters.

Penn is funny in his this-can't-be-happening reactions to the strange people he meets and the bizarre plots he finds himself tangled in. But he's the only real person among the zanies running amok in this Wonderland. The weird events that pile up in the story merely engulf him.

It's no wonder actors like Voight, who earlier this year did a wild turn as a snake hunter in Anaconda, and Nolte, usually a pretty boy, but here looking rabbity and worn, signed on for the strange U-Turn. A respected director. A chance to play against type and really do something different.

But Stone's film school camera tricks, which thuddingly underline the film's ironies in bold letters, and the goofy characters that fill the screen turn U-Turn into a carnival sideshow about style rather than about real emotions.