But what cripples this film the most is Kelly’s choice to juxtapose into his already fairly complex and sprawling future dystopia plot with not only his self-indulgent obsessions with the space-time continuum and pseudo-intellectual spiritual and scientific psycho babble held over from his previous film, but bizarre forays into musicals and comedy. In short, Kelly has undoubtedly intriguing ideas and symbolism peppered throughout the film, but his lack of willingness to hone or shape them into anything solid hurts this kind of grand-scale storytelling tremendously, creating a film that is not only immensely difficult to follow and incoherent, but frankly absurd and self-indulgent.

The DVD’s picture quality is presented in the 2:35:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, with the sound quality in Dolby Digital Surround 5.1. The DVD also comes with a pair of special features.

The first is the lengthy featurette “USIDent TV: Surveilling The Southland”. Featuring cast and crew interviews, it very much to its credit explains and dissects some of the film’s many cryptic elements, and the genuine confusion over the basic tenets of the film from actors like Lovitz, Rubenstein, and Wallace are very telling. Rounding out the special features is an animated short film “This Is The Way The World Ends”, which is mildly pleasing, but the animation rudimentarily primitive.

By comparison, Donnie Darko’s meandering science-fiction overreach managed to be relatively intriguing within the confines of a small-town adolescent tale of apocalyptic darkness. However, this kind of relentless complexity severely hamstrings a much larger-scale film like Southland Tales. While Kelly continues to be a great director, his lack of skill with actors and his obtuse, cryptic, and pontificating, psycho-babble-laden script with one-too-many characters mutates what could have been an incredibly intriguing future dystopia film into an absolutely incoherent, confounding, and self-indulgent mess.

Movie Grade: D
DVD Features Grade: B
Overall Grade: C