U-Turn Review

Oliver Stone is an idiosyncratic filmmaker and with his latest film U-Turn he again travels his own journey regardless of popular taste ... Sean Penn plays a petty crim on his way to pay a gambling debt in San Francisco when he arrives in Superior, Arizona more by bad luck than by choice. He strikes a major communication breakdown with the local mechanic Billy Bob Thornton, has a mystical conversation with blind Native American Jon Voight before meeting up with town beauty Jennifer Lopez ...soon he`s caught between a mutually murderous husband and wife, a decidedly antagonistic mechanic, an aggressively jealous Joachim Phoenix and an hilariously seductive Claire Danes ... Oliver Stone has got to be one of the most stimulating filmmakers of our time - maintaining the visually precocious imagery of Natural Born Killers he nevertheless traverses in a funny, grotesque and visually confronting way a landscape of human weakness in an alien and threatening world ... and he does it splendidly. While you rejoice in his technical skill you cringe at the violence and laugh at our hero`s ability to avoid it ... Sean Penn as Bobby Cooper, whose every attempt to get out of town is thwarted, is pretty impressive. Stone uses Nick Nolte in a totally refreshing way as the husband, and Billy Bob Thornton`s malevolent mechanic is a triumph ... but so is Stone`s use of American icons and landscapes in this strange western film noir ...I was excited by U-Turn by what it wanted to be and what it provoked.