There's not much reason to watch Straight to Hell unless you want to see cultural icons like Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Shane MacGowan, and Jim Jarmusch fail to act in a movie that gives them scant opportunity to succeed.

Sy Richardson plays Norwood, leader of a ragtag gang of bank robbers hiding out in the desert after their latest heist. They stumble across a small, isolated town populated by coffee addicts. People say weird nonsense to each other until their personalities clash enough to result in a gun battle. Most of the cast gets killed. It doesn't matter in the least who shoots whom for what reason, or even who lives or dies. I'm hesitant to call it a climax because the story doesn't have enough of an arc to satisfy the definition.

To be fair, Cox clearly wasn't trying to create relatable characters. Every one of them is a bizarre caricature whose only articulable trait is quirkiness. The problem is, if you're not going to make your characters relatable, you damn well better make them interesting.

Cox is no stranger to absurdism. He made Repo Man, after all. But even in Repo Man, the characters and the world they inhabit seem like oddball variations of the reality we all know. In Straight to Hell, it seems more like Cox is just being weird for the sake of being weird. There's no reason to feel engaged with any of the characters or anything they do.

The acting is generally atrocious. One problem is that none of the cast is given any sort of plausible human emotion to portray. Another is that many of them are not professional actors.

Some reviewers have suggested that Sy Richardson's Norwood was the inspiration for Samuel L. Jackson's Jules in Pulp Fiction. I don't see it. "Shooter with a jerry curl" is a flimsy basis for suggesting an influence. They have as much in common with each other as they have with Ice Cube in Boyz n the Hood.

I've also seen reviewers suggest that Straight to Hell is a parody of, or an homage to, spaghetti westerns. Okay, I can kind of see that if I squint hard enough. It's just not a very good one.

4 out of 10.

Seen on Tubi.