If ever one night you have a headache and decide to relax by watching a movie, may I kindly suggest that it’s not Southland Tales that you put into your DVD player? Director Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko is famously one of most poorly scored films in the history of Cannes, so much so that it took a year and a half to get the stink of that failure off before it was released however limitedly. But moving beyond matters of connectivity, the movie itself is a jumbled mess that looks awesome and does at times show signs of genius at work, but something got seriously lost in translation.

Based loosely on the Book of Revelation, or as I like to call it “The Thrilling Conclusion of the Bible,” Southland begins with a disaster and ends with a nifty time distortion of some type not really explained. Which also kind of describes Donnie Darko now that I mention it, but there you have it. The difference is that Kelly is attacking a little bit of everything with Southland: the War on Terror, the Bill of Rights, censorship, consumer culture, peak oil, you name it; if it’s a hot topic, Kelly’s spinning on it.

Dwayne “Formally known as ‘The Rock’” Johnson plays Boxer Santoras, a high profile actor and husband of the daughter of the Republican VP nominee, Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne). Boxer has no memory as some kind of accident has stripped him of it, so he is currently shacked up with porn star/entrepreneur Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Meanwhile, a World War 3 vet named Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), who’s also without memory, is being used as an unwitting pawn by Neo-Marxists to set-up Boxer and give Frost a political black eye.

With me so far? And I haven’t even got into any of the stuff involving Justin Timberlake as another Iraq vet that sits on a sniper post on top of a restaurant in the Santa Monica pier (he’s also the film’s narrator). Also, there’s been nothing told about ‘Fluid Karma’ and its dual use as a limitless energy source and hallucinogenic drug. Then there’s all the stuff about a ‘tear in the fourth dimension,’ which, when revealed, just made me cringe because it obviously looked like Kelly was intentionally revisiting Donnie Darko.

And sure, Darko was trippy, dippy fun that made you scratch your head while saying ‘This is awesome!’ but the thing of it is that Southland fails to make that connect despite the staggering similarities, and I think that’s what got a lot of critics upset. The problem here is that the story is too sprawling; too many characters, too many B stories, not enough focus on any one thing.

Darko benefited from having the theoretical scientific philosophy stuff confined to one character, it made the journey much more unique and much easier to accept. But in Southland you’re dealing with more than prophetic warnings from Frank the Bunny and obscure books by ‘Grandma Death’, there’s a whole pseudo-alt-history of the world you have to wrap your head around all while keeping the two dozen plus characters straight in your own mind.

Of course, this doesn’t do the actors any favours. Johnson is a fairly compelling actor, I would even say that he’s the De Niro of pro-wrestler turned actors, but the ambiguity of the movie does him no favours. Characters may not know where they fit into the world, but they need some kind of direction and I think that poor boxer didn’t have that.

Also impressive was Timberlake, but I feel like a lot of his character’s story was left missing somewhere. His pantomime to The Killers’ “All the Things I’ve Done” was a slice to watch, but there was little context. It was on of those scenes where you’re in awe for a minute and then things switch up to the next scene and you’re back at square one with a movie that’s showing you pretty things and not saying much.

But the film looks great though! That extra time and money for special effects really paid off. And it should be noted that in the midst of any tantrums about how Southland Tales doesn’t make a lick of sense, there are a few things worth pointing out. First, this may be a case of getting more out of a film on repeat viewing, but still I remain firm in the opinion that a movie should make some kind of sense the first time around.

Also, I don’t think that there are as many filmmakers that are as challenging as Richard Kelly, his movies have more ideas per minute than some can sustain thought their entire running time. It’s for these reasons that didn’t give Southland Tales a failing grade.