Saint John of Las Vegas (2010)

You won't be disappointed!

The Worst Film Ever

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

I don't really know a lot about how indy movies like this come to be. This isn't the result of some determined filmmaker exhausting his credit cards to see his lifelong dream come to fruition. This isn't the product of some movie star slumming their way to artistic credibility. This wasn't some cracklin' crazy script that a producer fell in love with and just had to see made. There's no sex. There's no violence. There's no blasphemy or other provocative storytelling. It's not noticeably clever or whimsical and Saint John of Las Vegas sure as hell isn't funny. Yet, a few million dollars and a cast of talented performers somehow wound up entrusted to writer/director Hue Rhodes to do with as he saw fit. We would have all been better off if "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes had been given a shot at making a motion picture. 90 minutes of Sarah Silverman talking with a lisp and delivering the bionic elbow to every other member of the cast would have been more entertaining.John (Steve Buscemi) is a sad sack with an out-of-date hairdo who works for an insurance company. He's also an absolutely, completely and utterly horrible gambler. He's the sort who'll buy 20 dollars of scratch-off lottery tickets and scratch them off in the store because he needs to win enough money to pay for the tickets. One day, John goes in to ask his boss (Peter Dinklage) for a raise and winds up getting assigned to investigate a fraudulent auto accident with Virgil (Romany Malco), the off-putting, hot shot lead investigator of the company. After banging his smiley face-obsessed cubicle neighbor (Sarah Silverman) in the handicapped bathroom, despite knowing she's involved with his boss, John sets out with Virgil on a voyage of non-discovery.If I tell you that John and his "guide" Virgil eventually meet a guy named Lucypher (Matthew McDuffie), you can probably guess what metaphor is at work here. However, this story has as much in common with Dante's Inferno as the back of a box of Captain Crunch. Hue Rhodes had better hope there isn't a circle in Hell reserved for people who make homages as botched and listless as Saint John of Las Vegas. In fact, if you know someone who's watched this movie and doesn't know it's classical origins, don't tell them. After sitting through this lifeless dreck, they'll never want to read the original.The actors here are all capable of fine work and Silverman looks pretty sexy while turning in a welcomely restrained performance. And for all his deficiencies as a storyteller, Rhodes' visual sensibility is at least more developed than the multitude of aspiring directors whose every inspiration seems to flow from music videos. But goodness gracious, this thing is not funny. It's not deliberately funny. It's not inadvertently funny. You can't laugh with it. You can't laugh at it. You can't laugh about it. The few times the film strays into the vicinity of a possibly comedic circumstance, like when John and Virgil encounter a nudist militia, writer/director Rhodes goes out of his way to avoid any humorous potential like an obsessive-compulsive who won't step on any cracks in the street.Saint John of Las Vegas is so lame and pointless that the only reaction it can spark in the viewer is incredulity at how anyone ever thought this thing needed to be made. The on screen appeal of these actors is all that allows it to be tedious instead of torturous. They don't actually do anything worth watching, but their presence can at least distract you from how poorly conceived and structured is this production. But you'd still be better off reading Dante in the original language, even if the only Italian you know is Chef Boyardee.

Steve Buscemi is at his best when working with a fast-paced script full of unanswerable one-liners (see 'Delirious'). Unfortunately the script for this film was was not of this ilk, and a Steve Buscemi at half speed is not a funny Steve Buscemi. What were the script writers and/or directors thinking of? Rarely do films with such potential for comedy fall as short as this one has. I watched it until the rolling credits for the main reason of seeing what the unsubtle twist was going to be. There was clearly going to be one and when it arrived it was as surprising as sunrise. In terms of entertainment value it's just about watchable but if you're a Steve Buscemi fan you might be disappointed with this when you quickly conclude that you have seen the man in far better form.

I've seen a lot of interpretations on Dante's Inferno: the guy enters hell. From here to saying any movie about someone's falling is an interpretation is a stretch. And I know the writer and the director thought they were being smart doing a modern adaptation from a story no one really cares about and basically replacing everything, but I was the one watching, and I didn't find it smart, interesting or even good.Steve Buscemi is one of my favorite actors, and he did play the part well, but the plot was simply a boring, useless, close to horizontal, descent into a hell that few people could have related to. The funny parts were not funny, the smart parts were obtuse, the action parts not existent. Oh, wait a minute... it was MY descent into hell, when I realize I've just wasted an hour and a half of my life for no good reason. I see now... really smart.Bottom line: Sorry, Mr. Buscemi, sorry sexy Sarah Silverman, the film just sucked for me.

This movie is making the festival rounds right now, but unlike a lot of over-hyped festival fodder,it is genuinely a good movie, which I suspect will soon become more widely available. It reminded me somewhat of the Coen brother's film "O Brother Where Art Thou?"--not in that it is in any way unoriginal--but it has a similarly surreal, absurdist sense of humor, and like the Coen brother's film, it is a modern adaptation of a classic work of literature, in this case "Dante's Inferno".The great Steve Buscemi plays "John Alegheri" (as in Dante Alegheri), a reformed compulsive gambler with a comfortable, if mundane, life living in a tract home and working for an insurance agency. But after he asks his diminutive boss (Peter Dinklage) for a raise, he suddenly finds himself promoted to fraud and, along with a partner named "Virgil" (Romany Malco), is sent on a fraud investigation, which proves to be a metaphoric descent into hell--and in particular, his own personal version of hell since the investigation takes place in and around Las Vegas, a city where he had some unpleasant personal history.He and "Virgil's" various bizarre encounters on their journey include a sexy stripper in a wheelchair (Emamanuelle Chriqui) still trying to perform lap dances, a group of heavily armed right-wing survivalists (including "O Brother's" Tim Blake Nelson) who also happen to be nudists, and in the most surreal scene, a tow-truck driver who has second job as a circus performer and as the result of a bizarre accident is stuck in a lawn chair in a flame-retardant suit that periodically catches on fire (and, hilariously, what he really wants is a cigarette). There's a some nice twists at the end and the character reaches a final personal epiphany while buying scratch tickets at a convenience store on the outskirts of the dreaded Vegas.Sarah Silverman plays a co-worker who he starts an affair with after a quickie in the woman's bathroom before he leaves on his journey. It's an unusual role for Silverman, not only in that it exploits her considerable sex appeal, but also in that while it is a comedy role, it is one very different from her usual foul-mouthed stand-up persona. Buscemi, on the other hand, doesn't stretch himself too much, but he doesn't really have to either--he's great at roles like this. The director was actually first-timer and this is particularly impressive as a debut effort (I suppose could complain that the only full-frontal nudity is provided, not by Emanuelle Chriqui or Silverman, but by Tim Blake Nelson!--but I won't). This was entertaining from start to finish. I'd really recommend it.