The Onion AV Club's Nathan Rabin came up with a great classification system for unsuccessful movies in his "My Year of Flops" series. There's the Secret Success, a watchable movie with a terrible reputation; the Fiasco, an ambitious disaster still worthy of grudging respect; and a Failure, dreck through and through. Richard Kelly's follow-up to the esteemed Donnie Darko, Southland Tales, falls somewhere between Fiasco and Failure. It is gargantuan in every way: its cast is huge, its special effects are plentiful, and it has an alternate-universe 2008 setting that finds the War on Terror growing into World War III. It is a sprawling story as well, so big in fact that Kelly has resorted to George-Lucas-style structuring (chapters 1-3 are graphic novels, and 4-6 comprise the movie). If all this sounds unwieldy, it is. No single aspect of the movie melds with the others. It all feels thin and half-formed. This would all seem to indicate that Tales is a textbook fiasco. But it starts to lean toward failure, because none of these disparate pieces is likeable in the least.
Kelly wears his influences on his sleeve here, even more than he did in Darko. Though the movie's laden with the cultural and technological tropes of science fiction, the Playskool My-First-Phillip-K.-Dick narrative hopscotch never allows you much of an opportunity to appreciate the world. As interesting as his apocalyptic premise might be in theory, there isn't an intelligible human story to anchor it. An equal amount of onscreen time is devoted to opaque characters played by such all-stars as The Rock, Stifler, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that guy from Night Court, and about ten SNL b-listers. None of them are given any depth, but this is actually something of a boon considering how obnoxious they all are. It's undeniable that Southland Tales is high-concept filmmaking. But a great high-concept movie can be summed up in a single sentence, and Southland Tales is too confused to be summed up in two hours and twenty minutes. — John Constantine