Richard Kelly's head exploded and the result was Southland Tales. I can't think of a more direct way to put it, and I'm sad to say I'm quite disappointed. This is Kelly's sophomore directorial effort, after his cult hit Donnie Darko, a movie I felt a great affinity for, but for everything he did right in that first movie, he does things wrong here.

Southland Tales takes a jumbled jab at Los Angeles culture, injected with a science fiction premise, stuffed with minor characters, given an infusion of misanthropic humor, and duct taped with political satire. Frankly, such an approach could have been good, in the sense that madness might be mistaken for genius, but anytime someone tries something like this, it becomes a high-wire act. Each misstep can bring the movie closer to being ridiculous, and this film features several missteps, although I would say two are particularly hurtful.

First off, it's just really too much. Works of art are usually appreciated for leanness rather than bloatedness. Here, we have several subplots in an already confusing time setting, where a nuclear bomb detonated in Texas in 2005, and now it's election year 2008. The war in the Middle East has escalated -- and in response to the sudden lack of oil resources, a mad scientist (Wallace Shawn) has invented an ocean-driven energy source. In the midst of this, an actor (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) related by marriage to a presidential hopeful has disappeared, lost his memory, and later been kidnapped by an underground ultra-liberal movement called the "Neo-Marxists." I lost track of their members, as they each seemed to have their own agenda, although they're all supposed to be fighting a corporation called "USIDent." Somehow this also involves twin policeman brothers (Seann William Scott), a former porn star (Sarah Michelle Gellar), and a gazillion other characters, most of whom appear deluded.

The movie seriously lacks focus. It also lacks narrative sense, but that's not quite the same thing. Certain filmmakers can make a movie without a clear narrative and still come up with something watchable because they have focus -- on themes, certain characters, performances, mood. Kelly seemed to have a lot on his mind when he assembled this movie, and it looks as if he put it together thinking it would be his last.

On top of this, the second major misstep occurs, which involves its attitude as conveyed through the film's characters. Apparently, Southland Tales is supposed to be a comedy, but its humor comes from a mean-spirited place, and it's so all-encompassing that none of its characters come off clean. As an indictment against the delusional ambition of Los Angeles, it revels in laughing at caricatures of the city's citizens. The weirdos of Venice Beach are extra-weird; the members of the scientist group are extremely kooky; the politicians are blissfully idiotic; many of the women are ultra-"femi-Nazis," while the ones who aren't revel in being dim-bulbed porn princesses. The main characters are presumably the ones played by Johnson and Scott, but their characters spend most of their time either incapacitated or confused.

It isn't that there aren't any sympathetic characters in this movie; it's more that there aren't any human characters. These are all cardboard people, and they're meant to be laughed at more than identified with (and this is reflected in the callous way many of them are disposed of). But nothing about them feels real either, so any laughter we might have rings hollow. In the end, it's a lot of actors dressed up in goofy costumes hamming it up as characters who are supposed to be jokes. Cheap jokes. That's as painful as it sounds. (And it also pains me now to realize a lot of the bad and sometimes cruel character portrayals from Domino were most likely colored by Kelly's screenwriting for that movie, and not by Tony Scott's directing.)

With so much information thrown in our faces and nothing real to latch on to, no amount of clever soudtrack programming or special effects can save Southland Tales. It has ideas roaming about in it somewhere, mostly about how hopeless our political landscape is given the self-centeredness and hubris of the people involved on both sides, and Kelly even falls back on a few riffs from Donnie Darko, including the eventual inclusion of a time travel element and a scene where a character has a face-to-face conversation with someone violently missing an eye. The ending feels strangely profound, but in an empty way. It shows that Kelly has a sense of being able to misdirect with his showmanship -- the kind magicians might use -- but he should have taken the time to mold certain selected ideas into an engaging shape. As it is, Southland Tales is just a mess, an amorphous misfire, and a real pity given Kelly's promising debut.

(Released by Destination Films and rated "R" for language, violence, sexual material and some drug content.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.