**/**** Image C Sound C
starring Kiefer Sutherland, Melora Walters, Jamey Sheridan, Leslie Stefanson
screenplay by Rich Greenberg and Wally Nicols
directed by Rich Greenberg
by Walter Chaw Closer to Flashback than to Freeway, the Kiefer Sutherland vehicle Desert Saints is actually closer to Montana than either: a neo-Tarantino erstwhile buddy road trip that pairs Donald's son with a flighty dingbat channelling Rosanna Arquette. Kiefer is Banks, a hired killer who hatches a plan with woman-on-the-lam Bennie (Melora Walters) to play house, check into the same (!) hotel south of the border to do his wicked business, and evade the pair of feds, Scanlon and Marbury (Jamey Sheridan and Leslie Stefanson), hot on his trail. Soul-searching and gut-spilling lead to the kind of sudden reversals that shift power from Banks to Bennie and back before ending in what can only be described as a confusion of trick endings telegraphed from the start. It's less delightful than I make it seem.
Sutherland, as he proved last year with his career resurrection on Fox's "24", can carry off grave, sleep-deprived men-of-action. His performance in Desert Saints is easily the best thing about the picture (while providing, too, its sole reason for resurrection), though even his best efforts can do little to negate the tedious time-warp narrative that muddies the stew without offering anything approaching insight or delight. Walters is awful, her fabulously uneven performance a product less of slyness than of breezy incompetence. Because her character is central to the story, her presence represents a charisma vortex right at Desert Saints' critical fulcrum. More than an incoherent, overstylized mess à la Christopher McQuarrie's The Way of the Gun, it's a missed opportunity to be a dutiful B-level road movie undermined by a surplus of chic and an insufferable chick.
THE DVD
Artisan DVD's full-frame transfer of Desert Hearts is muted and dull and indicative of the kind of feckless transfers that have become the company's stock-in-trade. Though the film doesn't really merit it, the cult of knock-off pan-and-scans appearing at your local Blockbuster at the rate of a truckload per week at pennies on the pound is bound to have a negative impact on the format in the long run. Only a matter of time before the cost efficiency of DVD outweighs the importance of the format to the collector, buff, and archivist–Artisan seems intent on being on the forefront of ushering in a whole new era of instantly disposable garbage tossed off like welfare children, wanted only for a cheap profit and sent into the world without a stitch on. A similarly unspectacular Dolby 2.0 audio mix graces the disc along with a predictably unremarkable trailer.
89 minutes; R; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Stereo); CC; Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Artisan
