It has taken more than 18 months of wound-licking, tweaking and judicious pruning since the disastrous premiere of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales at Cannes in 2005 for this ambitious, doomed folly finally to get a cinematic release. Part apocalyptic political satire, part state-of-the-nation address to a country in crisis, part paranoid stoner conspiracy: with his follow-up to Donnie Darko, Kelly is not short of ideas, but he seems incapable of stringing them together in anything approaching a cogent manner. And it’s not just that the narrative is a mess; the problems run deeper. Kelly is a thoughtless, undisciplined director – his camera shots and sight lines are all over the place; story threads are left to dangle where Kelly discarded them to go and play with something shinier and louder.

Kelly lays claim to his target audience of teens and twenties with the visual vernacular of computer games and babbling cable TV; he courts them with the ironic casting of pop-cultural phenomena such as Sarah Michelle Gellar, the former wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Mandy Moore. But I suspect he has overestimated their tolerance level for butt-numbing indulgence and weirdness. And although the CGI is glaringly in your face, and the issues that the film skirts around are contemporary enough (terrorism, war in the Middle East, depleted energy resources), the film has a dated feel – it has more in common with 1960s-style wacky satire than the cutting edge of 21st-century cinema.

Certificate 15, 144mins

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