Saint John of Las Vegas

I've seen a lot of interpretations on Dante's Inferno: the guy enters hell. From here to saying any movie about someone's falling is an interpretation is a stretch. And I know the writer and the director thought they were being smart doing a modern adaptation from a story no one really cares about and basically replacing everything, but I was the one watching, and I didn't find it smart, interesting or even good.

Steve Buscemi is one of my favorite actors, and he did play the part well, but the plot was simply a boring, useless, close to horizontal, descent into a hell that few people could have related to. The funny parts were not funny, the smart parts were obtuse, the action parts not existent. Oh, wait a minute... it was MY descent into hell, when I realize I've just wasted an hour and a half of my life for no good reason. I see now... really smart.

Bottom line: Sorry, Mr. Buscemi, sorry sexy Sarah Silverman, the film just sucked for me.

IndieVest shot themselves in the foot by putting this dud out as their first release. With their membership based business model of anyone funding a film, Saint John Of Las Vegas killed that platform after opening theatrically without so much as a whimper.

This is an unwatchable, amateurish disaster overloaded with quirk and just limps from one disconnected non sequitur to the next. How this pile of nonsense attracted Spike Lee, Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi as producers is more bewildering than the final product. This is an awful picture, that had the support of people that should have known better.

I knew nothing about this movie, but ended up catching it on a movie channel recently. I thoroughly enjoyed it and watched parts over again. It lacked a lot of action and it didn't really have many punchlines, but I found this lack of predictability to be one of the most endearing parts about the movie. While the movie is not at all predictable and often pretty absurd, it does not feel as if the absurdity relies on weird twists or surprises. While the situations feel bizarre, the situations and characters are much closer to reality than most everything else Hollywood puts out. I thought the acting was great, the characters bizarre, and the situations hilarious. Needless to say I found it very compelling and funny, and i did not need any Dante references to appreciate it.

Steve Buscemi holds this one together, the other main characters are impossible to identify with - either because they don't say much or they are mysterious and mean. There are a lot of bizarre situations that are thrown in which don't really further the storyline but show off a type of artistic creativeness. They definitely had a lot of good ideas here, and perhaps the movie would have been more interesting if they simply abandoned the tired story line and went from one hypnotic scenario to the next (Like Fear and Loathing). But the main story (the story about the insurance fraud) progresses in the background without momentum and when it is finally resolved it feels anticlimactic. But there is another story here, perhaps more important - the one concerning Steve Buscemis past. This could have been developed into a compelling and meaningful drama but it is only used to further the comedy (and to tack on the Confucious ending) There are a few laughs along the way here and a good deal of cute/quirky ideas. Could have been improved with a bit of storyline editing beforehand.

John (Steve Buscemi) is a compulsive gambler that in his last months has had a lot of bad luck and wants to move from Las Vegas to Pennsylvania and so he does a road trip with an insurance fraud investigator with which he joins his job thanks to Mr. Townsend (Peter Dinklage). John doesn't want to go anywhere near Las Vegas and on the road they'll meet a few odd types; a nude militant (Tim Blake Nelson), a stripper on a wheelchair and a human torch. John then realizes that his only solution is to go again to Las Vegas and face his demons head on.

The movie is billed as a comedy, but instead it was more a drama and it hadn't that many funny moments to begin with. The moments of the nudist and the stripper looked kinda awkward and only for the sake of shocking the viewer. If you are searching for a comedy, this movie is not for you.