THE MOVIE-                             1 1/2 stars out of 5

 

Southland Tales takes place in the near future after a nuclear attack in Texas in 2005 throwing the world into WWIII. The middle of the country seems to be lost and the Southwestern part of the country is renamed The Southland, hence the title of the film. The government has created US-IDent, an organization charged with monitoring each citizen, big brother if you will, to root out and remove all threats to the government.The film itself takes place over three days before the July 4th holiday, depicting LA as the epicenter of social, economic and an environmental disaster, including the creation of a machine known as Karma Flow designed to use the ocean currents to create unlimited energy which ends up slowing the spinning of the Earth resulting in rips and tears in space-time. The film is a real mismash of weird characters and plot lines, all woven in together and frankly, ridiculous. The plot lines include The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, an internationally known extreme fighting star who happens to be the son in law of the vice president who is kidnapped and suffers from amnesia, who is staying in LA with a porn star played by Sarah Michelle Gellar who is trying to develop her own porn based reality TV series, who gets caught up with Neo-Marxist group bent on bringing down the government. Lurking behind all the chaos is the plot line involving the Karma Flow energy device. The plot line here is really a mess and has little in the way of coherence and believability. The film looks hastily thrown together and is really difficult to watch and hard to follow and really hard to get into. This is the kind of film that would be easy to walk out on and in the case of home video, turn off and give up on entirely. Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy this film and would recommend that you skip it.

 

THE VIDEO-                        3 3/4 stars out of 5

 

Southland Tales is encoded with AVC and is presented in its original aspect ratio of 2:40:1. While the film itself is a disappointment, so its the video presentation. The film has a very muted and subdued color palette with very mediocre black levels. Image detail is mediocre as well. As a result, you have a rather dull and flat looking image that is soft and lacking in detail. While it does look HD, is not of the level that one has come to expect with Blu-Ray releases. Again, rather disappointing.

 

THE AUDIO-                        4 stars out of 5

 

In what is becoming a clear trend, I found the audio track here disappointing as well. Encoded with Dolby True HD, the audio is a flat as the video. For an action film with a chaotic and end of days theme, one would have expected a more edgy and immersive sound design. Yet, here the sound is rather flat and front heavy and the opposite of involving, falling to bring you into the action. Dynamics are mediocre as is the entire sound design. On the positive side, the overall sound is rather smooth, perhaps too smooth, and the dialogue well recorded and well placed in the mix. Overall, I was expecting a better sound design than what is delivered here.

 

IN CONCLUSION

 

Overall, Southland Tales is a rather disappointing release with mediocre audio and video and a lackluster script. This is a film you just may want to skip entirely.