It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Blistering performances.

Oliver Stone's "U Turn" is a small town Arizona story with love crosses and plot twists galore. A drifter (Sean Penn) breaks down in the Arizona back-woods and gets entangled with a spitfire (Jennifer Lopez) who wants to leave her twisted, abusive husband (Nick Nolte). The husband, on the other hand, wants his wife murdered. The town mechanic (Billy Bob Thornton) is a greasy local who dislikes city slicker outsiders and doesn't aim to make Penn's character's life any easier. Our hero also gets mixed up with a cute local waitress (Claire Danes) seeking refuge from her abusive boyfriend (Joaquin Phoenix). Billy Bob Thornton (at his greasy best), a grease covered mechanic who Bobby later calls (among other things) "dumber than a sack of hammers". After leaving his car to the mechanic he meets the lovely and exotic Grace. A fiery vixen married to a much older man (Nick Nolte), who wants him dead. Turns out Nolte's character Jake wants Grace dead as well.I'm not saying that "U-Turn" is Oliver Stone's best film, but it's definitely my personal favorite of his. The surreal cinematography, haunting music composed by Ennio Morricone, and the breathtaking scenery of the Arizona desert create a great atmosphere for greed, lust, betrayal, and murder. The atmosphere is compelling, all hangs together well, and we have something close to a film noir masterpiece until the scene on the cliff where our hero is supposed to push her off. Juggling the psychology in the film with the psychology he's working on the audience, Oliver Stone loses his grip and everything goes to ill-logic and blood and bodies. The combination of western sounds with his Italian style of music is a treat to listen to. The music compliments to the atmosphere of the movie and to the feeling of the landscape of Arizona.Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

A young punk drifter (Sean Penn) heading to Vegas to pay off his gambling debt before the Russian mafia kills him, is forced to stop in a Arizona town where everything that can go wrong, does go wrong for him.What the heck is this? We have a decent cast, from Sean Penn to Joaquin Phoenix to Claire Danes (to name a few). A director (Oliver Stone) who is not perfect, but has made generally good films. And yet, this is sort of a mess.Stone lets his artistic creativity go wild, with disastrous results. The camera angles and shots are goofy, and the plot is a bit too weird. While it seems like a metaphor for purgatory (or something like that), it comes out just being something of a poorly-mixed goulash.

A cast-ful of talent wasted on this tedious bit of desert "pseudo-film-noire." The plot's been covered at length here so just a few thoughts: 1. All the bills in a bag full of money are ENTIRELY DESTROYED by one shotgun blast? Really? This is a critical plot device because the whole movie depends on Sean Penn becoming penniless and "trapped" inside Superior, Arizona. And what happened to all the "money debris" that was floating around this store after the robbery? Oh, note that 3 $100 bills did survive because Penn gives those to the shop-owner so she'll keep mum about his presence during the robbery. C'mon, he could have least picked up the pieces and pasted together enough money to pay for his car repair ($200) and get the heck out of "Dodge." 2. Billy Bob Thorton is a hoot, as usual when he plays ugly, disgusting characters, which appears to be his natural forte. Covered head-to-toe with grey oil stains and smiling through hideously rotten teeth, he's the only major character in this film that we do NOT see enough of. He's got some great funny lines, too, like at one point when Penn calls him every name in the book, he responds with "Are those insults? Are you insulting me?" Penn gets what he deserves with the rude, insulting treatment he renders to the only guy for 50 miles who can fix his broken radiator hose.3. A young Claire Danes is enjoyable to watch as the teen-aged girl friend of an obnoxious and blowhard Joaquin Phoenix, who gets his butt kicked by Penn after accusing Penn of coming onto his girlfriend. These secondary scenes are actually more enjoyable to watch than the main action.4. As for what happens to Penn's character in the end... all I can say is "Stupid Is as Stupid Does."

Oliver Stone directs this John Ridley screenplay entitled U Turn,which is adapted from Ridley's novel Stray Dogs.It features Sean Penn,Nick Nolte and Jennifer Lopez together with Joaquin Phoenix,Powers Boothe,Billy Bob Thornton,Claire Danes and Jon Voight.This film is a Southwestern noir tale about Bobby Cooper, a hotshot who is stuck in the tight confines of Superior, Arizona, when his car breaks down. His subsequent adventure is a meatball comedy which is loud, obnoxious, and violent, and stuffed with diffused light, a hot cast, and a no-fat Ennio Morricone score.A drifter eludes Las Vegas collection agents and arrives in a small town where he decides to linger after his car has a breakdown. Here he gets involved with the locals, including an unhappily married couple - a businessman and his seductive, femme-fatale wife. A trailer trash teen also approaches him in an effort to get away from her abusive boyfriend. Tensions in the town escalate, eventually leading to murder.The first 40 minutes or so are "fun" to a point. Penn is the perfect near-creep to root for, and as he wanders back into town after meeting Grace, the eclectic characters pile up. But soon it gets monotonous, tiring, and just plain ugly. And when incest and bloody fights begin, the fun is gone. If Penn weren't so solid an actor and able to be empathetic in the most morose situations, the movie would be not watchable at stretches. Lopez makes another good impression, but this is not a performance that stands out.While,Nolte is raspy and ill-looking. Before U Turn is over, you are already wondering if Oliver Stone will do something else, something more important, soon.Overall,it is a long and strange trip of a movie that is fun but aimless.