Tulsa

Directed by Scott Pryor and Gloria Stella, Tulsa follows Pryor’s Tommy as his rough-and-tumble existence is thrown for a loop after the unexpected arrival of his nine-year-old daughter (Livi Birch’s Tulsa). Filmmakers Pryor and Stella, working from a script written by Pryor and Ty DeMartino, deliver an earnest yet predominantly unwatchable drama that suffers from a myriad of palpable problems, including an aggressively low-rent visual sensibility and an almost total absence of compelling, authentic characters, and it’s clear, certainly, that the mostly interminable atmosphere is compounded by a ludicrously and unreasonably overlong running time of 119 minutes. The spare storyline, which seems to unfold in slow motion, has been augmented with a whole host of wrongheaded, unappealing elements, which ensures, for the most part, that one’s efforts at working up any interest in or sympathy for the protagonists’ exploits fall flat on a distressingly consistent basis. (It doesn’t help, obviously, that both central characters are painted with the broadest strokes imaginable, with Tulsa mostly coming off as precisely the type of irritatingly precocious and obnoxiously sanctimonious little kid that could only exist in a movie.) It goes without saying, ultimately, that the tragic happenings contained within Tulsa‘s endless third act are hardly able to pack the emotional punch that Pryor and Stella have clearly intended, with the end result a misbegotten disaster that seems unlikely even to appeal to its target audience of dyed-in-the-wool Christians.

1/2* out of ****