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Southland Tales
EMAILPRINTSamuel Goldwyn Films

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 26 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 51 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama | Sci-fi
Written by: Richard Kelly
Directed by: Richard Kelly
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 14, 2007
DVD: March 18, 2008
Running Time: 144 minutes, Color
Origin: Germany / USA
Summary
RATING: R for language, violence, sexual material and some drug content
Starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Bai Ling, Cheri Oteri, and Miranda Richardson
The city stands on the brink of social, economic, and environmental disaster. Southland Tales is an epic story set over the course of three days that culminate in a massive 4th of July celebration. A large ensemble cast of characters includes Boxer Santaros, an action star stricken with amnesia; Krysta Now, an adult-film star developing her own reality-television project; and Roland Taverner, a Hermosa Beach police officer who holds the key to a vast conspiracy. (Samuel Goldwyn Films)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Donnie Darko Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Delivers equal parts overwrought tedium and mind-bending beauty, spiked with brilliant throwaway images that more than make up for Kelly's heavy-handed hot-button pretensions.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
If it arrives in final form as (still) a total mess, it's such a passionate and ambitious mess -- overcrowded with extraordinary images, incomprehensible ideas, literary and pop-cultural references and colliding subplots -- that it transcends its adolescent awkwardness and approaches being magnificent.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
In its willful, self-involved eccentricity, Southland Tales is really something else. Kelly's movie may not be entirely coherent, but that's because there's so much it wants to say.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Southland Tales has a mood unlike anything I've seen: dread that morphs into kitsch and then back again. It's a film that tried my patience, and one I couldn't shake off.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
To be clear: The odds are in favor of you hating it. I hated a lot of it when I saw a barely dry work-in-progress print, 163 minutes long, at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s 19 minutes shorter and better now, though “better” is relative when you’re dealing with a whatzahoozy such as this.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Richard Kelly's Southland Tales isn't just a movie. It's an apocalyptic piñata that's been bazooka-ed open.
Read Full Review >Empire Damon Wise
A bold and sometimes garbled take on modern American politics, this nevertheless marks an effective and surprisingly funny comeback for a film that many deemed to be DOA.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
Southland Tales pilfers large chunks of its plot and visual style from Alex Cox’s "Repo Man," Kathryn Bigelow’s "Strange Days" and Shane Carruth’s Sundance-winning "Primer," and unlike the makers of those films, Kelly hasn’t digested his influences and made them his own -- he’s more like the slacker college kid who’s just enough of an intellectual poseur to bluff his way to an A. That said, Southland Tales isn’t entirely without its pleasures, chiefly The Rock.
Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
You get the sense that Kelly is too angry to really find any of it funny. It's easy to empathize with his position, not so easy to remain engrossed in a film that's occasionally inspired but ultimately manic and scattered.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Andy Spletzer
It's an ambitious film, but that doesn't mean it's good.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Love it or laugh at it, you will gaze on Southland Tales with awe.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Dizzyingly incoherent and subversively surreal, this sophomore effort from the man who made the great, strange "Donnie Darko" is certain to have its fans. I'm not going to be one of them.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
The further Kelly bends his funhouse mirror, the more he loses sight of what it was supposed to reflect. By the end, the image has twisted beyond coherence.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Mark Bell
The film is just too much exposition, too long, too convoluted, too many characters and ultimately a huge disappointment.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
There's a lot of "stuff" here, and Kelly's biggest problem -- he's got more than a few -- is that he can't tell his good material from his bad.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
Southland Tales does have enough energy and audacity to suggest significant potential. But was it ready for public consumption? The answer is no. It's as simple as that.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
You can't be both political and incoherent, and even though Kelly's models are "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Blade Runner," this vision of the near-future suggests a random blend of "Dr. No" and "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett
The English term "shambolic" best describes a slow-paced, bloated and self-indulgent picture that combines science fiction, sophomoric humor and grisly violence soaked in a music-video sensibility.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
Rarely has a picture been so self-consciously designed to be a culturally meaningful touchstone, and fallen so woefully short, as Southland Tales.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
May be ambitious in its genre-defying abandon, sideswiping science fiction, satire, film noir and melodrama along the way, but it's also exasperatingly convoluted, self-amused and politically sophomoric.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt
It appears that Kelly spent the intervening years (since "Donnie Darko") taking hallucinogenic drugs, reading Philip K. Dick novels upside down, and – most disastrously – believing his own hype.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
If a more incoherent and self-indulgent movie has been released so far this century, I'm not aware of it.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.1 (out of 10) based on 51 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
David M. gave it a0:
In with a bullet to the top of my Top10 Worst Films of all time, Eeeegad...how Kelly managed to get one dime to fund this sucker is beyond belief? Amazing thing, hype.
Clint J. gave it a1:
Wow. can I have those minutes back to my life? Big words have been used to prop this "film" up but those are by people who feel as though if they dont understand the film they are not sophisticated enough or enlightened enough. The fact is I you like drugs and are on them this film is for you. If you only have 2 hours of free time because you work hard and are not currently taking prescription mecds or doing drugs--leave it alone and go watch pulp fiction again.
Bart C. gave it a9:
Richard Kelly is good at what he does hands down. He is easily climbing to the top when it comes to young and unique directors. Southland Tales is no exception. It is hard to view this film once and completely understand the choices Kelly made. The whole film is clearly not meant to be taken seriously or to have a plot that needs to be analyzed. Kelly knows what he is doing and is doing it for a reason or a higher meaning. Most underrated film of the last decade.
Tim G. gave it a0:
What. The. Hell. I'm going to be honest, I only watched the first hour, so if this film exploded into a mass of coherent plot and storyline after this point, then I apologise. But I had to turn it off because I was getting genuinely angry with it. The film starts with some sort of nuclear attack seen through a camcorder at a garden party, and I thought then that the film could be great - just my thing, but I was so wrong. The next thing we know, we're in the not so distant future, but a future that looks like the year 3000. There didn't seem to be a reason for that. Characters appeared randomly without explanation, The Rock is apparently an actor who needs to drive around with some cop, while his porn star girlfriend (Sarah M-G) rambles about some premonition for the future. Why did Rock need to drive around with him? Who knows, because it wasn't deemed important enough to explain. Was the country in a state of nuclear war? Again, no idea, because an hour in all we'd seen was one explosion in the first minute. The only hint that they might have been at war was all the nice shiny metal things, and fancy computers. I was left with no idea who any of the characters were, what they were doing, why they were doing it, or how any of them had anything to do with a nuclear war. My assumption was that Justin Timberlake was shoved in as a narraror because the story line was so weak that without him him it would have been nonsense. Unfortunately his part involved talking nonsense. I want my hour back.
[Anonymous] gave it a9:
Some people are too rigid, too mainstream, and too unimaginative. These people are the ones who gave a bad rating to this film. I've never watched a movie in which I actually enjoyed not knowing what the heck was going on, being completely lost in the plethora of non-nonsensical plot lines. The end clarified some things, and caused other things to become even more convoluted, which was great. I loved all the cameos in this movie and the Rock and Stifler were amazing.
Dane B. gave it a0:
How is the average a 6.3. This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I don't care what type of point it was trying to get across, it failed horribly.
Seth C. gave it a0:
What happens when pop culture collapses in upon itself. A mess of a film that pretends to not be a mess by calling itself "surreal". I'm sorry Mr. Kelly, but to be surreal you'd need to know how to make a surreal film. Overwrought expositional dialogue kills this movie. Learn how to show rather than tell. That is the crux of surreal film-making 101 and a point that was missed by this filmmaker. There will be those who claim that the point of this film is to transcend genre definition and there will be those who call Kelly on his bullsh.t. I hope most people will be able to fall into the latter category.
