Saint John of Las Vegas

enjoyed this short movie - (just under 85 minutes) - because the actors are in full character start to finish. and the strip club scene is a great laugh with the wheelchair bound stripper and buscemi playing her on!

once you meet the characters they are consistent and do not vary. malco is so good in his wacky and slightly mean insurance investigator role you have to like him. and buscemi is perfect as the 'forever looser' you just feel sorry for him. and casting dinklage as the insurance company owner was just genius! and silverman is always easy to like.

the story is easy to follow until the junk yard scene near the end with the gun shots! at that point with buscemi escaping and calling the cops (watch it) i became confused as to exactly what just took place in the plot line. that is the only reason i am rating it 2 stars short of a 10.

if you enjoy indie films pick this one up!

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.

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.

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.