-By David Noh

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Completely defining shaggy-dog tale, Saint John of Las Vegas posits Steve Buscemi as John, a full-time loser of an insurance-claims adjuster in Albuquerque, with a tortured history in Sin City. His boss, Mr. Townsend (Peter Dinklage), turns a deaf ear to his nervous request for a raise, and assigns him a tricky case involving a seemingly fraudulent auto-damage claim made by a stripper, Tasty D Lite (Emmanuelle Chriqui).

Writer-director Hue Rhodes has an overriding penchant for the quirky, not to mention kinky, which provides his film with some nasty laughs but eventually suffocates all audience empathy and comic life out of his crazy confection. He favors deadpan reactions to outrageous situations, like ingratiatingly imperturbable female convenience-store cashiers drily watching our hero alternately trying to woo them, as well as having a nervous breakdown, while he buys thousands of dollars worth of lottery tickets. A few of these sequences ring the bell amusingly, but are all too often merely baffling, like John’s encounter with a carnival performer (an unrecognizable John Cho) trapped in a suit which periodically becomes engulfed in flames, or a bunch of full-frontally naked bonding cowboys.

With such an eclectic cast of reliably eccentric comedians, it’s a real shame that this farce becomes so enervated and flat. Sarah Silverman plays Jill, John’s inamorata of a co-worker who likes smiley-faces and having her hair pulled, but, beyond that, she hasn’t much of a character. Her performance is all teasing promise with no follow-up.  Dinklage, with his usual uncannily magisterial authority, manages to be amusingly Napoleonic and inscrutable. Chriqui is fast becoming my favorite oddball character actress, after her lowdown ’ho turn in Women in Trouble and her funny appearance here, giving an amazingly adept lap dance while ensconced in a wheelchair. Romany Malco plays Virgil, John’s co-worker, full of bad-ass African-American attitude but, so typical of Rhodes’ conceptual sketchiness, little else.

Rhodes has evidently placed a lot of faith in indie king Buscemi’s ability to pull all this off. The actor retains his somehow ingratiating, bug-eyed, perpetually aghast persona, but is hard-pressed to make emotive sense in a film which even employs a surrealistic dream scene in a church where the black congregation exhorts him to strip off. There are moments here which have him simply improvising limply, scenes that, in any other less creatively impoverished production, would have surely ended up on the cutting-room floor.