The Brown Bunny

A passable, if often dreary, evocation of those '70s road movies in which disillusioned young men (and the occasional woman) took to the highway in search of America, the meaning of things or maybe just a hamburger.

A road movie, but made by someone who seems so self-absorbed he might as well be asleep at the wheel.

What plays for 80 minutes like an intolerable, self-indulgent road trip largely redeems itself in the last 10 minutes, through a moving explanation of the anti-hero's catatonic depression.

So mind-numbingly dull it makes you yearn for one of those World War II-spy instant-death pills.

Must be one of the truest songs of roadside America that the movies have produced.

Narcissisistic, self-indulgent, solipsistic claptrap is still narcissistic, self-indulgent, solipsistic claptrap, no matter how long or short.

When every other scene looks like a cola, jeans or motorcycle commercial -- perfectly unposed with hair proudly mussed -- Gallo's motivations seem too compromised.

As a truncated work, it stands as a road movie tone poem.

A humorless self-indulgent and self-loathing mess that is saddled with an uninteresting story and arty pretensions.

Personally, I think there's a haunting and fairly poignant story here; too bad it's surrounded by so many damn driving scenes.

Vincent Gallo is probably a much more interesting fellow than Bud Clay, the inarticulate motorcycle racer he portrays in The Brown Bunny.

Is it good? Not really. But as was the case with his Buffalo 66, Gallo once again shows himself to be a fascinating enigma and possibly his own worst enemy.