Half a great movie

Rating: 5/10 (30 April 2011)

What we get with 'From Dusk til Dawn' is half a great movie and half a pretty conventional boring one. Don't get me wrong I love me a good vampire film but these vampires aren't very interesting at all. What is interesting is the heist and hostage plot at the beginning of the film that suddenly derails into a merely okay vampire film.
I think there are moments in the first half of the film that match some of the great Tarantino moments. I love the black humor in the relationship between Seth and Richie. They are genuinely very interesting characters who are kind of repulsive but you can't help but be interested in them. The first twenty minutes of the film are brilliantly constructed. The liquor store scene is thrilling, suspenseful, and yet very funny at the same time. But what is even more interesting is the time spent at the motel. I love the scene where Richie interacts with the hostage as we know something terrible is about to happen to her but in typical Tarantino fashion he invites her to indulge on the TV with him. The Keitel plot line is seamlessly translated into this. I genuinely like his character and the interactions between him and the Gecko brothers are brilliantly played out. Keitel has a conversation with Clooney's Gecko about religion and faith at the wheel of a hideous RV which is fascinating and deep but is played through Tarantino wit. I was hooked. There is genuinely a very interesting take on religious themes with the Jacob character. Putting a religious man in Tarantino's world is just really bizarre and really fun and yet the dialogue doesn't make fun of the weight of this character. There's a tragic quality to him. Keitel gives a great performance.
And as our characters reach the Mexican border things get less interesting. Vampires come from literally out of nowhere. Wow and I found myself saying just as this thing was getting good. Of course I knew the film was about vampires going in but I was hoping that it would continue through this lens. These vampires pop up out of nowhere and waste no time rampaging through everything totally putting whatever character development that was established to rest through gore. I like vampires I do but these vampires aren't interesting or scary. They aren't charismatic or sexy and they don't even talk. The make up design for them is cartoonish. It just isn't interesting at all. I've seen this done thousands of times before and it just is dumb because I don't see anything resembling a point happening here. And forget Tarantino's dialogue because once these vampires show up the only type of lines you'll be hearing are "Stake him!", "I've been bite", "Bloodsuckers" and that sort of thing. The thing that frustrated me most was seeing Keitels character in vampire make-up because he looks absolutely ridiculous. In a way that symbolized what I felt about the film. It could have been great if it stuck with the first part of the story but that RV made a wrong turn into stupidity.