Sioux City

Review of Sioux City, aka Ultimate Revenge

Lou Diamond Phillips is Jesse Rainfeather Goldman in this tale of a Sioux indian boy given up for adoption to become a casualty department doctor fostered by two Jewish parents in LA.

When he receives a letter and amulet from his birth mother on his birthday, he is bound to go and look her up in Nebraska, only to find she died under suspicious circumstances. He gets re-acquainted with his relatives, such as his medicine man grandfather and also with a girl working at the local store (Salli Richardson - allow me to pick up my tongue from my shoes, please... wow). All he can remember of his mother are flashes of memory, her giving him up, and her being knocked about by some faceless man.

After pressing his luck by trying to impress on the local chief of police that his mother's death wasn't an accident and picking up the chief's daughter (Lise Cutter), he gets followed around and is almost beaten to death by the local police hoodlums.

This is an interesting movie, even though it has all the production values of a movie of the week, made for tv, Canadian effort.

It's main thread is about an unsolved murder, but it is really about the multiplous ethnic/racial/national/religious/professional identities many of us juggle with in this modern world. Considering his biography, this might well be a crypto- biographical effort on the part of Lou Diamond Phillips, and why he might have taken on the project and directed it.

All in all, not a great movie, but not a really bad one either, and interesting for it's existential ideas and viewpoints, rather than it's thematic originality.