Metacritic reviews

However simply he approaches this familiar milieu, Mr. Stone winds up treating his story's sin-soaked connivers the way Francis Ford Coppola treated vampires. Neither of them is really capable of anything plain.

Yet for all its unmistakable visual trademarks (hypersaturated colors; mad-scientist tinkering with film stocks and editing technique; sudden presentation of enigmatic, troubling images), this is also the most radical departure Stone has ever made in terms of basic sensibilities.

Yet, although Stone has clearly made this motion picture with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, he nevertheless manages to capture all of the tension and mystery necessary to hold the viewer's interest.

The standard noir trappings are here: the femme fatale, double-crossing, fatalism, broken dreams, innocence betrayed and the rest of it. But Stone pushes it all so far and so relentlessly that it becomes absurdist comedy.

The latest in an unending series of bleakly comic, nihilistic neo-noirs to reach the screen, U-Turn's story of a bad day in an Arizona hell invests a lot of skill and style in a trifling tale. So it manages to sporadically amuse even while it's wasting your time.

There's no overt message in this fatuous montage of crowd-pleasing brutality, just double and triple crosses, gory shoot-outs set to ironically cheerful Peggy Lee songs and tons of horrific, technicolor Americana.

It demonstrates a filmmaker in complete command of his craft and with little control over his impulses.

U-Turn is, for a while, darkly amusing. But along comes the second hour, which insults you for even partially succumbing to the first.

This is a repetitive, pointless exercise in genre filmmaking--the kind of movie where you distract yourself by making a list of the sources.

The film has no discipline, but that's okay because it has no suspense, either.