Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly's cult first feature, was so heavily praised that it was perhaps inevitable that his second would contain delusions of grandeur.

Southland Tales is a long, apocalyptic, political satire set largely in California, which presents a world in 2008 in which Texas has been nuked and there's no oil left for the defence of the realm. Presented at Cannes in 2006, it was laughed out of court.

Now it has been re-edited and shortened. But it is no better. There are so many ideas and plot-turns, and so few characters who make sense, that to see it again is pure torture. Making nonsense of TS Eliot, Kelly suggests that the world is likely to end not with a whimper but with a bang. He also suggests that the Book of Revelations might have been written by the Apostle John while under the influence of hallucinatory mushrooms.

So, it seems, was the plot. There's a mysterious German corporation arriving in the Southland with a new formula for fuel and a drug that will put the population of California under its spell. There's Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as an action star stricken with amnesia, Sarah Michelle Gellar as an adult film star keen on developing her own reality show on television, and Seann William Scott as a Hermosa Beach policeman who holds the key to a vast conspiracy.

Also involved are Miranda Richardson, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore and Clerks director Kevin Smith. But don't ask me what happens since that is almost impossible to decipher. The whole is part satire, part sci-fi, part thriller and part musical. It is also, in Kelly's words, "both a love letter and a hate letter to Los Angeles".

But none of it works and the film's tedious scatter-shot approach and interminable length count against it. Never, in fact, has so much energy been expended to so little effect. It makes you think that Donnie Darko was just a happy fluke.