The Forgotten Quentin Tarantino Movie That Cast Him As God (Or Something)
If you were an American independent filmmaker in the '90s, you could do a lot worse than casting Quentin Tarantino in a role. Odds are, you were already trying to rip him off anyway — maybe putting him in the movie could bring some of the magic he delivered with 1992's "Reservoir Dogs" and 1994's "Pulp Fiction." Movies like Rory Kelly's "Sleep With Me" let him play himself, riffing on the homoerotic subtext of "Top Gun." But only one movie trusted that the director's acting chops were sufficient to play the role of God. Or something.
That was "Destiny Turns On The Radio," a sprawling and silly crime comedy where prison escapee Julian (Dylan McDermott) returns home after three years spent locked up. He's hoping to make good with ex-girlfriend Lucille (Nancy Travis) and tie up loose ends with others like partner-in-crime Thoreau (James LeGros) and his Pappy (Tracey Walker). Meanwhile, lounge singer Lucille is romantically involved with Tuerto (Jim Belushi) and trying to get signed with the help of Ralph (David Cross, giving the only high-energy performance in the movie). Eventually Julian wins back her heart and the two attempt to escape Tuerto, as well as the police on Julian's tail.
Against all these dime fiction cliches is a mystical, solitary figure named Johnny Destiny (Quentin Tarantino), the man who drives Julian back into town in the movie's opening. As Thoreau tells Julian, "It's beyond one man's power to stem the tide of chaos." Thoreau is Julian's first indication that things have changed, that the force of religion has come over his old world. That Destiny is now running the show.
Tarantino-esque
It makes sense that "Destiny Turns On The Radio" would cast Quentin Tarantino as a figure of supernatural cool. The movie has a sensibility ripped from mid-century crime novels and film noir, a sensibility that gets amplified by the desert motel settings and the stylized dialogue. Besides those inspirations, it clearly draws from another film people associate mostly with Quentin Tarantino: his 1994 breakthrough hit "Pulp Fiction." While that movie was an irreverent series of episodes set in and around the criminal underworld, it inspired a lot of imitators that, as Roger Ebert said, "knew the words but not the music."
Like a lot of "Pulp Fiction"-esque films to come out in the mid-90s, "Destiny Turns On The Radio" draws so liberally from that film that it could be fairly called a ripoff. "Destiny" has the same postmodern stew of colorful characters, anachronistic details, casual racism, and surprisingly deep worldbuilding. It's got the same seductive impression of sex, drugs, rock and roll. And like a lot of its fellow "Pulp Fiction" ripoffs, it only rarely captures some of the magic of that movie. Long dialogue scenes about nothing may abound, but they feature nothing as memorable as John Travolta talking about a "royale with cheese."
In that fashion, the movie's story of ex-con Julian looking to make good on his past indiscretions falls a little flat, a bit too serious to be a parody and a bit too wacky to play as comedy, even with characters like an older Italian man named Vinnie Vidivici (Allen Garfield). That aesthetic tension emerges further in the hardboiled dialogue and cheesy blues riffs that make up the movie's score, and the existence of a deity-type figure in the story only complicates it further.
Destiny. Johnny Destiny
But who is Johnny Destiny? "Casino," another 1995 movie about Las Vegas, was the highlight of Sharon Stone's career. It's likely nobody involved in "Destiny Turns On The Radio" felt that way about their movie. Least of all, Quentin Tarantino himself.
Johnny Destiny is just one of the many eccentric denizens of Las Vegas portrayed in the movie. But where everybody else is a hustler, criminal, or dreamer, Johnny is like a figure out of folk tales. Quentin Tarantino plays him like the epitome of cool, far away from the roles he tended to play in his own films, but perfectly at home in this movie's heightened reality.
When he mumbles that his name is "Destiny. Johnny Destiny," it's easy to wonder how seriously Tarantino took this role. And he dives headfirst into the movie's almost mystical take on the city, saying, "Vegas ... anything can happen there." Las Vegas, in this movie, is an expansive and strange metropolis of strip malls, casinos, empty swimming pools, career graveyards, and the supernatural. Johnny is what Thoreau calls a manitou, or a "god with a small g." The idea that a figure of such grace could exist in this movie's seedy world is classic '90s irony.
Besides his supremely goofy entrance in Thoreau's swimming pool, where he uses the power of electricity to strike awe and fear into the man's heart, Johnny Destiny seemingly uses his power to help Julian and Lucille. Chased down both by Tuerto's goons and the police, the two star-crossed lovers use every trick out of the book to secure an escape route. It's only through the intervention of Tarantino's character that they get close to it. But just close to it.
Tarantino's acting skills
More than anything, "Destiny Turns On The Radio" now looks like a time relic of that period in the '90s where, as a New York Times interview with Quentin Tarantino put it, "every third script out there is described as 'Tarantino-esque.'" The go-nowhere, but still busy, plotting, the musical numbers that go on forever, the solid cast (besides Tarantino) doing shtick that feels beneath them, the allusions to God — in the best-case scenario this all might add up to something pleasurable that just feels a little thin. But this isn't the best-case scenario, and every individual piece of the movie's architecture is out of tune with the rest, creating something uniquely obnoxious.
Still, it's Tarantino's performance that feels like the movie's most significant legacy. The director had always harbored a fascination with acting but was capable of putting it in the backseat when the opportunity to make his own films arrived. But with the underground excellence of "Reservoir Dogs" and the massive success of "Pulp Fiction," Tarantino was given far more roles than somebody of his acting talent might expect. And he took them, as well as the "potshots" he felt he consequently got from critics, per the New York Times.
"Destiny Turns On The Radio" just happened to miscalculate what he could bring at his best. Nobody who's seen Tarantino's small roles in "Pulp Fiction" or "Django Unchained" thinks he's a great actor, but when he's directing himself, he makes for big, funny characters that jump off the screen. Playing subtle and cool, and godlike, was not his strong suit.