You know what? All this would make a great, sprawling novel. The movie feels like it tried to cram everything from that hypothetical novel into the screenplay instead of streamlining it to appropriately fit the film medium. Characters show up, disappear, die, reappear, and it's often very hard to tell since we can never remember their names. I was desperate for just a little bit more focus. I understand Kelly was going for adjectives like "epic" and "sprawling", but it's possible to be epic and still have a tight, coherent script.

Because parts of the movie work. Many parts. Timberlake is a great narrator, and in the middle of the film performances a great drug-fueled song-and-dance routine while lip-synching to "All These Things I've Done" by The Killers. I have no idea why it's in the film, but it makes a neat music video. And individual plot points I loved, like the manner in which Roland and Ronald finally meet up, involving an ATM machine being dragged down the street by a truck during a riot.

I'm assuming the large cast more or less delivers exactly what Kelly wanted them to, which feels like mixed results to us. I think Johnson (a.k.a. The Rock, although he drops that moniker this time around) is usually a strong actor, so I found his decision to basically do nothing but constantly twiddle his fingers against each other - in every single scene - a little annoying. Gellar, meanwhile, has a smaller part than I was expecting, and one that seems almost entirely inconsequential, although who knows.

Then there's all the current and former Saturday Night Live cast members. There are so many of them, it literally becomes a running joke by the time Jon Lovitz shows up.

Southland Tales got its start in early 2001, when Kelly started writing a futuristic satire of Los Angeles to vent his frustration over the trouble he had getting Donnie Darko released. After 9/11 and the Iraq War, he started throwing all the political stuff in, and found enough funding to shoot the film by 2005. In 2006, he brought a 2 hour and 43 minute cut to the Cannes Film Festival that was considered by almost all critics there to be a complete disaster. Sony later picked up the film on the condition that Kelly would recut down the film dramatically; the version we're getting now is 19 minutes shorter, includes some new special effects work, and cuts out some subplots (one including Janeane Garofalo, yet another SNL veteran).

Since I never saw the original cut, I have nothing to compare this one to, but it still feels like we could shave off a few subplots. (What does the obsessive Santaros fan at USIDent add to the story? Who is Fortunio and who has he been working for all along and why do ...