U-Turn isn't just a lousy movie; it's one of those colossal stinkbombs, like Wild at Heart or Showgirls, that retroactively fouls a director's past work. In Stone's last movie, Nixon, the Montage-O-Matic functioned as a kind of celluloid sausage-grinder: The director shoved in showy cameos and specious docudrama and hokey time-lapse photography, and the machine spat out something much like sousemeat--a compression of unsavory ingredients into an unspeakable whole. But Stone could at least argue that his style was appropriate for Nixon, a public figure who was subjected to kinesthetic media bombardment--just like the serial-killer celebrities of Natural Born Killers and the trial-balloon conspiracies of JFK. No such claim holds for U-Turn, which is set in a sleepy small town where nobody even appears to own a TV. It's plainly not the country or the century that's suffering from an attention deficit; it's the director.

The plot of U-Turn is almost identical to the sleeper Red Rock West (and a dozen other noir thrillers before it): A stranger gets stuck in a scrubby desert town, catches the eye of a mysterious femme fatale, and soon winds up caught between her and her murderous husband. But Stone doesn't care about the story's dull familiarity; he's too busy changing film stocks and recycling other directors' leftover camera tricks--a Spike Lee dolly, a Sam Raimi zoom--to work up a shred of interest in the characters or the setting. The town seems to change size at whim; in one scene, it appears to have a single, flyblown spaghetti-western street, then it turns out to have a wealthy real-estate mogul and a half-dozen candidates for public office.

Some of the actors do surprisingly fine work in the midst of this nonsense: Sean Penn as the drifter antihero has a miserable why-me scowl that gets funnier as the movie goes along, and he has a couple of hilarious sparring matches with Billy Bob Thornton as a mush-mouthed menace of a crooked mechanic. Jennifer Lopez makes an effectively elusive siren, and Powers Boothe brings a quiet authority to his role as a sheriff. But they're lucky: They haven't been tricked out in goofy List of Adrian Messenger disguises, like Jon Voight's Halloween-costume Indian or Nick Nolte's false teeth. (Between Nolte and Thornton, the movie succeeds as a cautionary tale for proper dental care.)

Oliver Stone got his start working on low-budget horror movies and exploitation flicks, and he reportedly loves them still: Last year he executive-produced the savage little gem Freeway, a blood-soaked rewrite of Little Red Riding Hood. But U-Turn has a contemptuous feel, as if the director couldn't be bothered to focus his energies on such a trifling story. It's such a mess that it's being marketed now as a sort of ironic comedy, and about the 20th time you've seen the boom microphone drop into the frame, you're tempted to believe it.