Saint John
of Las Vegas
R (strong language, nudity); 85 min.
The deadpan comedy Saint John of Las Vegas opens with Steve Buscemi walking into a Vegas convenience store, plopping down an envelope full of cash and asking for a thousand lottery tickets. "Why not?" he asks with a mixture of defiance and despair.
Why not? Well, for starters, there's no lottery in Nevada. It's a small detail, yes, but indicative of a movie that tries so hard to echo Dante's Inferno that it neglects to create characters and a story that can hold our interest for even the film's scant 85-minute running time.
Buscemi plays John, a guy who apparently had a great run of luck in better days but is now confined to a cubicle under the harsh fluorescent lighting of an Albuquerque insurance office. An opportunity for something better arrives when John's nutty boss (Peter Dinklage) sends him and the company's best fraud investigator, Virgil (Romany Malco), on the road to look into a dubious car accident just outside Vegas.
But first-time writer-director Hue Rhodes never tries to fill in the blanks about John's past or his present fears and compulsions. He's too eager to send him on a superficial road trip, where John meets a stripper in a wheelchair (Emmanuelle Chriqui), a group of desert nudists and a salvage-yard owner named (groan) Lucypher.
None of these encounters is interesting, save for a conversation John has with a tow-truck driver (John Cho) who moonlights as a carnival human torch. The Torch's suit has gone haywire, causing him to burst into flames every 20 seconds as he waits for the fuel tank to empty. The Torch doesn't seem to mind, though, except that he could really use a smoke.
As a portrait of one man's journey toward dignity, Saint John isn't bad enough to create its own special circle of hell. As a comedy, though, it's anything but divine.
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