29 Palms (2002) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

A law clerk finds out that his judge is about to alter his position on an important ruling. Instead of ruling in favor of some Indian casino rights, the judge will rule against them, despite the fact that the Indians have paid the judge handsomely for his co-operation. Obviously, the Vegas gambling interests paid him more to change his mind. The judge can't afford to have the clerk rat him out to the Indians, so he takes pre-emptive action. He goes to the tribal chieftain with a ludicrous story that his clerk is an undercover FBI agent about to spill the beans on their racketeering. The Indians then try to kill the alleged agent, but end up killing his girlfriend instead. At that point they decide it is time to call in a professional hit man to finish the job. The Indians give the hitman an athletic bag filled with money, and the REAL film begins - following what happens to the bag.

The rest of the plot seems to come straight out of Tarantino or a Guy Ritchie movie like "Snatch" or "Lock, Stock ... "

The hit man is robbed of the bag by a security guard. The security guard is robbed by a crooked cop, who sends the money to a backwater bus station in the town of 29 Palms. The judge's clerk, running away to 29 Palms after having narrowly avoided the attempted hit by the Indians, ends up with the bag by accident, not knowing what it was. Yeah, I know, that coincidence was a bit too much to believe, but the film is basically a black comedy. Flush with his new-found cash, the clerk then buys a car, and two more bags which look exactly the same as the original and fills them with books, so that he can use them as decoys. He picks up a hitchhiker.

From that point on, the film is a violent, coincidence-riddled, and often incoherent chess game between the security guard, the crooked cop, the Indian gangsters, the clerk, the hitchhiker, the bus station manager, and the hit man, with the three bags changing hands several times and all of the characters coming together, separating, then coming together again.

Bull Pullman was one of the highlights of the film in a truly strange comic performance. He agreed to do one day of shooting in a cameo as the bus station manager. He ended up doing a recreation of Dennis Weaver's weird motel clerk in Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil

The reason I found this DVD interesting is not because of the movie itself, which has some good elements and demonstrates a lot of talent, but is just too confusing. The best part of the DVD package is the story behind the filmmaking. There is a full-length commentary by four of the producers, which is surprising for a movie that (to my knowledge) never played any commercial theaters. There are also two very long summaries, obviously written by somebody intimately involved with the film, which explain the complicated plot and the equally complicated dream scenes. By reading these two synopses, it is possible to get a better understanding of the plot, and to distinguish between the film's reality segments and its flights of imagination.

But there's a problem - and a lesson. The plot summarized in the "bonus features" is not the same as the plot of the actual movie. The written synopsis includes many additional elements which were obviously trimmed to make the film's running time more economical, to make the plot more coherent, to eliminate some unnecessary additional confusion, to get rid of a political agenda which ran through the sub-text, and to remove some elements which just plain didn't work.

The cuts provided some benefits for the film. For example, the film lost a completely silly plot twist in which the hit man turned out to be the real FBI agent. That didn't work. Even in a comedy, it wasn't plausible to claim he was a good Fed after some of the things he did earlier.

The cuts also created some continuity problems, as cuts often do. For example, there is a lame sub-plot about the security guard having become impotent from an incident portrayed in the movie. In the DVD version of the film, the dirty cop calls the security guard "limp dick over there" when they first meet. Huh? We get the joke, but how could the cop know about that so that he could make the joke in the first place? Obviously, a transitional scene was cut.

Compared to what I saw on the DVD, I have read some grossly inaccurate plot summaries written by authors on the internet, and I have to believe that's because different versions of the film were seen by those authors from the Spring of 2001, when the film was first made, until now, some two and a half years later, when the film is finally available to the general public on DVD.

So there you have it. Tarantino gone wrong. ... an excessively complicated plot and a bunch of trims ... a crazy conflict between producers and their director ... a $1.5 million dollar film that ended up costing $4 million and never getting a theatrical release.

The result: a film that looks like it might have had some real potential, but got lost along the way.

The cool thing: the complete DVD package allows you to study how it all unraveled.

It is really interesting to see all the different options that the filmmakers had in front of them, and to second-guess them on the final cut, especially on the last five minutes of the film, which confused and disappointed me, but were inventively cobbled from nothing by the editor. Could the team have done better? Maybe. I don't know. But it is fascinating to watch the movie, then to read the summary (thus realizing which decisions they made), then to hear how the decisions got made, and to think about the result. Whether or not they could have done better with the footage they had, I'll bet you the filmmakers have had a lot of time to think about it, and wish they could do it all over again. What they ended up with is not a very good movie, but I'll bet they could make one if they had another chance with the same cast.