Keys To Tulsa

Keys To Tulsa

Keys To Tulsa stars Eric Stoltz as the drug-addled black-sheep spawn of crazed southern matriarch Mary Tyler Moore. When Moore cuts him off, Stoltz becomes embroiled in a large and barely coherent blackmail scheme featuring crazed Southern belle Deborah Kara Unger; her crazed, drug-dealing husband James Spader; crazed redneck heir Michael Rooker; drug-addled stripper Joanna Going; and wealthy crazed businessman James Coburn. Unfortunately, Keys To Tulsa manages to squander its strong cast by burdening them with ridiculous accents, one-dimensional characters, and witless, overwrought dialogue. Stoltz is solid if unspectacular as the oversexed, lowlife film-critic protagonist, but he's surrounded by a veritable orgy of self-indulgent overacting. Chief among the offenders are Unger and Spader, who are evidently trying to overcompensate for their restrained performances in Crash by veremoting hysterically as a hard-living southern couple straight out of a community-theater production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Luckily, almost everyone in the film gets to bust out the histrionics, from grotesque gargoyle Mary Tyler Moore to Cameron Diaz, who manages to humiliate herself thoroughly in a small cameo as a ditsy Southern belle. While Keys To Tulsa certainly has scattered effective moments of camp excess, at two hours, its sheer tackiness soon becomes tiresome and stale, making it one long, excruciating endeavor.

 
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