Saint John Misses the Jackpot
John (Steve Buscemi) is a recovering compulsive gambler who has left the big alluring lights of Las Vegas to work as a lowly insurance adjuster for hard-hearted Albuquerque, NM business owner Mr. Townsend (Peter Dinklage). Hoping for a promotion, his boss assigns him to work with his top fraud investigator Virgil (Romany Malco) to look into a suspicious accident involving a Nevada stripper named Tasty D Lite (Emmanuelle Chriqui).
Steve Buscemi in IndieVest Pictures' Saint John of Las Vegas
Sounds good, especially considering the fact he’s interested in dating preternaturally happy fellow coworker Jill (Sarah Silverman) and a raise would allow him to treat her like a princess, but problems arise the closer John gets to Vegas. Old urges start to return, while weirdness with the case involving individuals like a gun-toting desert rat (Tim Blake Nelson) and a nicotine addicted Freak Show firebug (John Cho) who can’t douse his own flame force him to question why he’s investigating this case at all. But then everything, including his own life, appears to be some ungainly and unsolvable mystery, John trying to put the pieces together so his otherworldly fantasies can find a home in his rather banal reality.
Saint John of Los Vegas is an odd one to try and talk about. It’s one of those independent productions that’s quirky, weird and unusual in all those almost stereotypical independent ways, and as nicely as it’s acted and put together it’s just so out there for the sake of being out there enjoying it is kind of close to impossible. There is no emotional resonance to the character or to his plight, and whatever sort of allegories writer and director Hue Rhodes is going for I can safely say by the time things were over none of them ended up working for me.
Not that the film didn’t hold my interest. Certain individual scenes are remarkably solid including a great one between John and a wheelchair trapped Tasty and her strip club that featured an intense honesty the rest of the picture sadly lacked. That desert moment between the two investigators and a very naked Nelson was also surprisingly amusing, while a conversation between Buscemi and Cho is both touching and funny for all the right reasons.
The problem is the whole thing ends up feeling like a bunch of vaguely interconnected vignettes more than it does anything else. Worse, as caring a person as John is the movie doesn’t exactly go out of its way to make him a fully fleshed out human being. I didn’t care about him or his hoped for relationship with Jill at all, the emotional center of the film has unappetizing as showing 19 when the dealer flips over a perfect 21.
By the time it was over a part of me couldn’t help but wonder why I stuck around until the very end. Even at a brisk 85-minutes Rhodes’ movie is relentless in its eccentricity, it’s final twists and turns so telegraphed it isn’t exactly difficult to figure them all out long before the reveal. No one here got me to care one way or the other for how everything was going to turn out, and to say Saint John of Las Vegas misses out on the jackpot is like saying doubling down on a pair of threes is an enormously bad idea. It’s just not very good, and too bad this movie partially set in Vegas couldn’t have emulated that city’s famous slogan and just stayed there.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
