Mojave

If you're looking for an escapist, suspense thriller "Mojave," probably isn't the movie for you. Rather than an edge-of-your-seat genre drama, this self-referential flick is more of a cerebral satire of Hollywood.

Made for a modest budget and full of the quirky, unusual roles that actors love, this film is clearly a passion project for its writer and director, the Oscar-winning writer of "The Departed," William Monahan.

Like most narcissistic, send-ups of the beloved and despised film industry, "Mojave" revolves around a brilliant but tortured filmmaker, Thomas (Garrett Hedlund), who rather than laboring in front of his typewriter (yes, these people still use typewriters), ventures out into the Mojave Desert to be alone with his thoughts and act like a bad ass.

Though it seems that there is no one around for miles, a rifle-toting serial killer just happens to be eyeing Thomas. Jack (Oscar Isaac) we'll find out later is an unsuccessful artist who now camps in the desert and accumulates innocent victims as notches on his gun.

After creeping Thomas out, filling his head with a lot of cerebral wordplay and references to himself as the devil, Isaac tricks his artistic doppelganger into shooting a park ranger. Though the filmmaker tries to cover up his crime, he can't cover up his identity. And it's back in Hollywood, on Thomas' privileged home turf, that Isaac intends to do the ultimate damage.

Oscar Isaac channels some of the great pseudo-intellectual Hollywood villains, like Robert De Niro in "Cape Fear" and Robert Mitchum in "The Night of the Hunter," for his portrayal of a smart but ineffectual artist gone bad. And Walton Goggins and Mark Wahlberg get to take jabs at the Hollywood hierarchy with their sardonic character roles.

You'll see a lot of shots that mimic Hitchcock and other great thrillers, but there is no suspense in them. This film intellectualizes its genres, having duels take place as conversations over a bar table, rather than with guns in front of the O.K. Corral.

Though there are several "deleted scenes" on this Blu-ray they are mostly just existing scenes with a few extra shots added to them. And the featurette "A Doppleganger and the Desert: Making 'Mojave'" is interesting enough, if technically poor and somewhat thrown together.

"Mojave"
Blu-ray $24.99 DVD $19.98
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