We Made a Blog

“Saint John of Las Vegas” begins with John Alighieri (played by Steve Buscemi) midway through the journey of his life, within a gas station dark and his straightforward pathway lost.
 
Director Hue Rhodes has taken on the retelling of the Inferno and, arguably, the entire Divine Comedy in 85 minutes of flat desert. He pairs John with insurance fraud debunker Virgil (Romany Malco) in a quest to find proof to deny a claim to a wheelchair-bound stripper. John is led through his own circles of hell – corporate America and Las Vegas – by Virgil and delivered into the hands of his smiley-face-bedizened Beatrice, Jill (Sarah Silverman) for the rest of his journey.
 
The film falls within the new genre of quirk but Rhodes doesn’t live up to the higher practitioners of the art (Kaufman, Gondry, Anderson, Jonze) in that he hasn’t created a cohesively odd universe for the audience to immerse themselves in. They find pockets of weird, though, a reigniting human torch comprising some of the best of those moments. Heavy-handed allusions (a lighter that says “Abandon All Hope”) are a shame since they outweigh the defter ones (quotidian gates symbolically open and close between the hell, purgatory and heaven segments).

There are some steadily underplayed performances. From Buscemi, particularly, who makes excellent use of his wounded chihuahua persona to bring a forgiving vulerability to the role.

“Saint John of Las Vegas” might not be a divine comedy, but it’s a comedy of a higher order.