Jackson & Ricci give strong turns in this overheated sultry piece of Southern Gothic pulp fiction

Rating: 7/10 (9 March 2007)

BLACK SNAKE MOAN (2007) **1/2 Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci, Justin Timberlake, S. Epatha Merkerson, John Cothran, Jr., David Banner, Michael Raymond-James. Overheated sultry piece of Southern Gothic pulp fiction about an aging R&B singer/farmer named Lazarus (Jackson in arguably his strongest role since "Pulp Fiction") whose struggle to deal with his wife's infidelity leads him to the bottle and crosses the unlikely path to salvation and redemption in the broken form of a young woman named Rae (Ricci in her best work to date) whose unhealthy sexual urges leads to an odd coupling in this melodramatic fable. Fierce acting by the leads buoy this 'button-pushing controversial' story (yeah, the black-white thing and the centerpiece sequence where Lazarus chains up the fevered, 'wicked' Rae nearly takes over the core of the film  a love story; get over it!) and filmmaker Craig Brewer smartly lets his actors work themselves into a lather for this ripe morality tale, however the final act ends too abruptly which makes the previous seem arbitrary by design.