U Turn

U-Turn is about a man named Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn) who is on his way to pay a debt to a gangster when his car breaks down in the small, redneck town of Superior. There, Bobby is taken advantage of by the good IL' boys in every way possible, from the dirty mechanic to the town sheriff. He meets a beautiful girl named Grace (Jennifer Lopez) and falls for her, and she seemingly falls for him as well. From here, there are twists and turns in the plot all the way to the very end of the movie.

Sean Penn was decent as Bobby, but seemed a bit week and was taken advantage of a bit too easily. I guess that was Bobby's character so he did a good job. Jennifer Lopez did not have as big a part as I thought, but she did OK with it. Nothing spectacular, just OK.

The characters that stole the movie, in my honest opinion, were Darrell the mechanic (Billy Bob Thornton) and Toby N. Tucker (Joaquin Phoenix). They had the redneck stereotypes down pat, especially Thornton.

This movie was a decent little thriller. I am glad I did not see it way back when it was in theaters but it is OK for a rental. I give 7 of 10 stars.

Bobby Cooper is on his way to pay off his gambling debt to a Las Vegas loan shark. However when his car breaks down he has to wait in a small town until it is fixed. Unwittingly he is meets a beautiful woman and her husband, who offers him money to kill her. With the odds stacking up against Bobby he finds himself drawn deeper into greed, theft and murder.

This was a step away from political dramas and conspiracy thrillers for Oliver Stone, here he takes a standard film-noir plot and gives it his own touch. The plot is pure noir - full of shady characters, femme fatales, double crosses and murder, but it is compelling right till the end. It's thrilling to see Bobby become trapped in the town of Superior by a series of events (some coincidental, some deliberate) and unable to get away from the inevitable.

But what Stone does makes it even better. He films the whole thing in a style similar to that of Natural Born Killers, except not as graphic. He uses different film stocks, he cuts in different shots of characters while they voice over - the overall effect adds to the tension and the feeling of excitement. However he also makes good use of the wide landscape and uses long panoramic shots - this isn't a pop video director! Another great touch is the music - it's not moody like most noirs but instead mirrors the bright desert by being upbeat and unusual, the overall effect being a very quirky feeling.

The cast are roundly excellent and a great list of names. Sean Penn is totally believable as someone who tries to avoid the unavoidable and you do feel like he's trapped. Lopez has not been better - she is every inch the sultry femme fatale. Nolte is creepy as her husband, and does well mixing his gruff exterior with deeper guilt. Powers Booth, Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes are all good in minor but still important characters. Pleasant surprises exist in the rest of the cast with Jon Voight, Laurie Metcalf and Liv Tyler making cameos - although in the case of Tyler I found it more distracting than the others (she appears in the background as if the film is saying "look - it's Liv Tyler".

Overall an excellent criminally-ignored film with a great cast and the touch of a great director.

It's like a trip into purgatory, and the place is filled with devils and yes, that includes our protagonist. It's like a twisted version of Chinatown but without the big conspiracy but with the incest plot. All with the crazy style and editing a la Oliver Stone.

The thing is J. Lo should have used this role to really help her film career but she screwed it up. She didn't use it to her advantage at all, she didn't bring all the characters out to the surface. But the rest of the cast is crazy, in talent but also in the direction they take the characters. Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Voight, Powers Boothe, Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes, Julie Hagerty. All were insane and over-the-top but low-key great.

"U Turn" seems to be a movie that not many people have enjoyed and I really wonder why that is. I'm not saying that it was the best movie ever, but it sure deserves better than what most people over here say about it.

The story starts with Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn), driving somewhere in the middle of the desert in Arizona, on his way to pay the bookies that have already taken two of his fingers because he was too late to pay them. His car breaks down and the only option that he has is to leave the main road and to go to a small, dusty town called Superior. In this town live all kind of weird people. A blind Indian who doesn't do much else but drinking Dr. Pepper on a bench, next to his dead dog; a dumb garage owner; a young macho, called T.N.T, who seems to come straight from the fifties and his nymphomaniac girlfriend... Bobby Cooper wants to get out of there as quickly as possible. But he has one problem. He's got no money because he was robbed and the mechanic charges him an enormous price for the repairs. He can't do anything else but to stay in the village, to try to live with these weird people and to stay out of the hands of the bookies until he has found some money...

I must say that I was quite surprised by this movie. The way everything was shot is really well done and the music (composed and selected by Ennio Morricone) gives it all an extra touch. Even all the acting was very convincing. With people like Sean Penn, Billy Bob Thornton, Joaquin Phoenix and Nick Nolte I don't expect anything less than a good performance. But it has to be said: Jennifer Lopez, who certainly isn't a great actress, was actually pretty good in this movie.

All in all this is a very good movie, plenty of dark humor, good acting and some very nice shots. Personally I think this is one of Oliver Stone's finer movies and that's why I give it a 7.5/10.

This is one of my favorite Oliver Stone films. It has everything (cheating incestuous sex, chopping off digits, a dumb hick mechanic, a blind native American who wants Dr. Pepper all the time, etc etc etc) that a well-rounded movie needs, plus it was completely done in a comic fashion. It is closest to Stone's other film "Natural Born Killers" by way of stylish camera shots and the addition of comedy into a dramatic setting.

Sean Penn brilliantly plays the lead character, whose car blows a radiator hose out in the middle of the Arizona desert, and the closest town is that of Superior, AZ, a dirt-road town with barely 1,000 people living there, if that. Penn goes through hell from the beginning when random characters in the city want something from him and in return, it drives him to try his best to get the hell out of Superior. Everything during his days in Superior is centered around money and the fact that he has hardly any. So he gets schemed into murders, and he gets whatever little he has taken away from him (his train ticket gets ripped up by the local hoodlum, TNT, again brilliantly played by Joaquin Phoenix, and he has several full bottles of beverages broken for different reasons). Therefore, he's constantly running in circles to get out of this town.

There is an all-star cast (back then, and now) of actors: Jennifer Lopez (a better singer than actress), Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix, Billy Bob Thornton (the best among the bunch as the hick mechanic), Sean Penn, Claire Danes, Liv Tyler (only for a second in the train station), and Jon Voight...all packed into a nice DVD. The music had that comic, light-hearted side to it (with the country sound of a jew's-harp played over violin or whatever, etc) which helped you to see the irony that is driving him to madness in this town. Again the camera shots were awesome, and they had that Oliver Stone quality of the 90's where he would switch frames with the villain of the movie with an animal skull and switch the point-of-view to see what the actors are seeing, and so on.

I didn't like the ending so much. I kind of wanted things to resolve themselves, but instead, things just keep on falling into the bad-luck-category of his life. I also hated Jennifer Lopez's delivery of lines (just like in any other movie with her...The Cell, etc) because they feel so fake and put on that you know the director was just looking for T&A for the film. Also she doesn't play a native American very well. She has a thick accent straying too much towards Latino that you don't pick up on any cultural change until you get the story.

Overall, though, (bad point aside) it is a brilliant movie that is easy to watch if you like the other Stone films. I had to give it a 9/10 for great performances, great music, awesome story, and everything in between. Go out and buy it if your a fan of any of the actors listed above, or if you are trying to find a great weekend film with friends.