I agree with Maltin's verdict..."pretentious pap adds up to zero"...

Rating: 3/10 (23 August 2005)

I can scarcely believe the cult status this film seems to be getting here at the IMDb board. It's a totally enigmatic mess of a nightmare "from end to beginning", to coin a phrase based on the fact that the story is told backwards.
If it made even one iota of sense to me, it was only toward the end when I had a clue as to what I suspected all along. But even then, nothing was clear and much of the story is unresolved so that you, the viewer, can fill in all the gaps depending on how brilliant and imaginative your mind is.
The storytelling technique used here is a tricky one and altogether unsuccessful, in my opinion. As far as I'm concerned, short term memory would be a blessing if only to forget this one entirely. The payoff is zero, as Leonard Maltin has already suggested, and makes watching a film like this a total waste of time.
GUY PEARCE does an okay job in the central role but his talent is totally wasted in a script that is as ungrounded in reality as his character is supposed to be. The film itself is all style and no substance, as pretentious and manipulating as any film can be that does not respect its audience.
JOE PANTOLIANO and CARRIE-ANNE MOSS are competent but their characters are given coarse language full of expletives that should have been directed at the script they were forced to recite rather than inflicted upon a viewer patiently trying to follow a deliberately incomprehensible storyline. What hurts here, is there is no real solution to the puzzle, leaving the audience just as confused as the central character.
What should have been a taut film noir turns out to be nothing more than a cheap shot at manipulation.
Apparently, audiences these days are willing to swallow anything that seems unusual or offbeat in its appeal but--even so--there is no way I can account for the sort of comments I see here. Are we watching the same film???