Las Vegas. A seedy motel. Richard (Thomas Jane) awakes next to Gina (Lauren HOSTEL: PART II German), woman he has barely gotten to know, with a name he's not sure how to spell. They married the night before. Richard brings her a breakfast of an apple and a can of pop. Today is the day they get into her Dodge Polara and leave Vegas. Leave the city of sin and their sins behind and make a fresh start. Together.
Purchasing coffee to go at a gas station diner a stranger warns Richard not to get lost driving through the desert at night. Behind the wheel of the Dodge, Richard does get lost and turned around and has to back track. Along a lonely stretch of highway they come across a single car accident, narrowly avoiding a severely injured man flailing his arms about while standing in the middle of the road. Mobile phone not working Richard and Gina carry the now unconscious man into the back of the Dodge in an attempt to get him help. Still lost and starting to bicker, Richard and Gina are startled by the injured man who they thought on death's door sitting up and asking for a cigarette. The man seems to know who Richard and Gina are and is asking curiouser and curiouser questions.
Thomas Jane's directorial debut plays out like a cross between an episode of the TWILIGHT ZONE and a film noir. With the Vegas setting, the opening scene finding Richard in bed with a blonde after a long night of drinking and the hard boiled narration I expected Jane's character to be a riff on his character from the pulp fiction homage GIVE 'EM HELL MALONE released the same year as DARK. Instead his character here is very different from the hard boiled Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe archetypes. Richard isn't much of a fighter, doesn't think fast on his feet, is more interested in building a solid relationship with his new found love and unlike his wife doesn't pack heat.
Jane also chose to embue his film with a hyper stylized look meant to invoke film noir. Much of the film was shot using green screen with CGI making up the dark and foreboding world. I struggled with the look for the first third of the film. It looked odd, quirky. And frankly amateurish. If Jane was going for the look of a comic book from the height of the film noir period I didn't get it. That unique look may have gone well with a 3-D release, the film was shot 3-D, but the U.S. disc release is 2-D only.
The film builds to an ending that is meant to be a sucker punch to the throat but instead had me scratching my head wondering how it made sense. Unlike the TWILIGHT ZONE's less than 30 minutes an episode (yes, I am ignoring the hour long ones) there's not enough plot to sustain a feature length film. The film is never boring, just confused and oblique.
** out of ****
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