Here's something that doesn't happen everyday, or even any day, but is a staple of that alternative universe located somewhere between Hollywood and dreamland: a stranger rolls into town and is immediately mistaken for a contract killer. Offered $5,000 dollars to bump off a bar-tender's wife, he heads out to inform his victim of her husband's intentions only to be offered more to bump off the bar-tender instead. Attempting to take the money and run, he high-tails it out of town but he does not get very far before he has run over a man at the side of the road who, as it turns out, has previously been shot. I could go on, but it only gets more complicated.

Writer/director John Dahl wisely does not attempt to disguise the outlandish coincidences that his twisting plot hinges on, but instead revels in them, piling them up to an almost ludicrous degree to create a contemporary film noire that supplements its nightmarish narrative drive with the knowing edge of pastiche. He is aided and abetted by actors noted for performances more than a little beyond the pale, with Nicholas Cage as the straight guy forced to pay for his one moment of weakness (accepting the contract money with no intention of fulfilling it) and Dennis Hopper playing to type as the wisecracking psychotic killer whose fee Cage has collected.

The result is snappy, dryly funny and entirely inconsequential. Dahl went through these motions before with a straighter face in Kill Me Again. While he displays little of the sheer intensity or visual relish of the Coen brothers or David Lynch, directors who have brought real vigour to the same territory, he scores with the sheer panache of a thriller that owes as much to the ads for Red Rock cider as classic noir.