
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 29, 1995                   TAG: 9505010021
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WRITING DOES `DESTINY' IN

This is what happens when you combine too much tequila and too many Tom Robbins novels: "Destiny Turns on the Radio." And the audience walks away with the definite sense that someone had so much darn fun writing this movie that the audience was doomed to have none at all.

It's silly, overwritten and features one of the dullest car chases in the history of motion pictures. It stars boring Dylan McDermott as Testosterone Poster Boy Julian Goddard, a caricature con and moviemaker in-joke. And last, but not least, it has Quentin Tarantino playing a minor deity named Johnny Destiny, whose path to the spirit world is an electric-yellow swimming pool at a rundown Las Vegas motel named The Marilyn. For guess who.

Did Tarantino - the boy wonder behind "Reservoir Dogs" and Academy award-winning "Pulp Fiction" - lose a card game or something? He couldn't think of a less humiliating way to pay up for a run of bad luck?

Could be a simple case of egomania: Maybe Quentin thought he would do the Sam Shepard thing and prove he can act and write.

Unfortunately, Tarantino didn't write "Destiny": Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone get the blame. Newcomer Jack Baran directed.

The flimsy story is about Goddard, who escapes from prison and returns to Las Vegas to reclaim his girlfriend, Lucille, and his share of proceeds from the robbery that landed him behind bars.

Unfortunately, the money disappeared.

"It's gone," says Goddard's friend Thoreau (James LeGros).

"Gone?" Goddard screeches. "What do you mean it's gone?"

"Gone," Thoreau repeats. "As in 'went away'"

(This same snippet of snappy dialogue is repeated later in a lame effort to create the illusion of style.)

Goddard swaggers around Vegas, with the police in close pursuit. They want Goddard. He wants Lucille (Nancy Travis) and the money. Destiny wants - well, to look cool, I guess. What he should be looking for is the name of a really good tuxedo shop.

There's some sort of mystical connection among the vanished money, Destiny and the swimming pool, none of which deserves explaining.

The one nice thing about this movie is LeGros, who made his mark in "Drugstore Cowboy" and "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle." He is totally appealing, as usual, and makes the movie almost watchable in all of his scenes.

But there aren't enough of them, and "Destiny Turns on the Radio" is just unfair, finally: The writers had all the fun, and the audience experiences only the hangover.

Destiny *

(R) for profanity and adult situations, A Savoy pictures release, 110 minutes, showing at Tanglewood Mall Cinema.

by CNB