Huge disappointment...
OK spoiler warning...
I'm genuinely surprised that people thought this was a decent movie. I found it incredibly boring and completely flat. Sitting through this movie felt more like watching the filming of a movie rather than an actual story with actors that believed in it. The supposed character development was so forced and contrived that I could never get into the story however hard I tried. It made me cringe to see Danny Huston try to portray an investigator/detective/reporter. How were we supposed to react to him? I guess we were supposed to accept the gratuitous and silly sounding self-descriptive and obvious lines the actors spit out as a satisfactory substitute for actual story and performance. His goofy smile, while probably not his fault, belied any credibility his character tried to develop. When he finally reached that point of credibility (almost at the very end), the writers made him lose it by actually making him naive enough to trust the sheriff. Of course, that was just one of the many examples of the awful acting and writing combinations that caused this train wreck of a movie. The only decent performances in this film were Daryl Hannah as a doped-up bimbo and Richard Dreyfus as an arrogant jerk.
When a writer tries to create too many loops and intertwine too many clever twists without engaging the audience first, the story becomes too transparent and is made to seem that it is being too clever for its own good. The faint suggestion of an ending is a slap in the face (and a cop-out by the director) to those who sat through this movie for 2 hours and they deserved something more solid.
I don't have a problem with a cynical or satirical movie. The problem I have is when people are too cowardly to follow through and decide to bail and fall back on either cheap laughs or cheap emotions. If you try to make the cynicism too cute, like in this movie, or temper it with hollow sentimentality, a la The Contender, then you betray your very message. One thing I must applaud about this movie was how it was able to fool so many recognized actors and actresses into attaching their names to this mess.