"Southland Tales" is a madcap projection of the world President Bush is about to leave us, as imagined by the maker of "Donnie Darko."

If only Richard Kelly's apocalyptic fantasy noir were as intriguing as it sounds. "Southland" may be ambitious in its genre-defying abandon, sideswiping science fiction, satire, film noir and melodrama along the way, but it's also exasperatingly convoluted, self-amused and politically sophomoric.

Set mostly around Santa Monica and Venice Beach, Calif., in 2008, it imagines a parallel-universe America at war with the Axis of Evil, following a nuclear attack on Abilene, Tex., on July 4, 2005. The Bush administration has appointed a corporate think tank called USIdent to monitor all cyberspace, and a home-based neo-Marxist rebellion is in full bloom. Figuring somewhere at the center of all this is Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), a Republican-connected action movie star with memory loss who becomes a pawn for Marxist schemers a la "The Manchurian Candidate."

Johnson knows how to use his physique to comedic advantage; his delicately neurotic finger twitching is amusing. But it's hard to understand the purpose of the project around him, which seems hellbent on featuring as many celebrities in preciously crazy mode as possible. Look for such diverse performers as Meryl Streep, Christopher Lambert, William Seann Scott (in twin brother roles as a cop and Iraqi war veteran), Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porn star and scriptwriter, Cheri Oteri as a muscle-bound Marxist agitator and Wallace Shawn as a demented scientist-schemer called Baron Von Westphalen. But don't look for much more, unless you enjoy recognizing too-cool-for-film-school references to yesteryear classics such as "Kiss Me Deadly" and "The Manchurian Candidate."

-- Desson Thomson (Nov. 16, 2007)

Contains nudity, lewd sexual content, profanity, drug use and violence.