Entertaining but insubstantial

Rating: 7/10 (30 October 2004)

First off, I generally enjoyed KB1. It's got some very entertaining fight sequences and strong visual style, and while the blood was excessive I found it more comical than gross, even though I normally have a low threshold for gore.
But I'm left with the same feeling I get from any Tarantino film: so what? Tarentino could be described as a pop artist like Andy Warhol, who made his fame making replicas of Campbell soup labels and putting them in art galleries. Tarantino made a very stylish, slick, high budget homage/pastiche of shlocky action films. It is convincingly like those movies. But it doesn't bring anything new to the formula. Tarantino's films seem to exist entirely on the surface, lacking any subtext beyond, gee, weren't these movies really cool? Isn't lots of blood funny? Tarantino's consciousness seems to have gelled when he was about 17 and not gone anywhere since, and his style serves only itself. He has nothing to say about revenge, or violence, or the moral code of the warrior, he just throws it all up on screen because he thinks it's really neato.
Which would be fine if he were making a cheap action picture, but Tarantino imbues his films with the sense that he's doing something really special when he's just recreating formative films from his childhood. And the feeling that the movie means to be bigger and better than its inspirations but really isn't makes the experience somehow hollow and unsatisfying, like a cake that is so airy you feel you haven't eaten.
This so what feeling has kept me from enjoying previous Tarantino films. Tarantino's scripts would work best with more straightforward direction, which is why True Romance worked better than any of the scripts he has directed himself. Still, I did enjoy this movie overall, I did give it 7/10, and it is the first Tarantino-directed movie I have genuinely enjoyed.
I just feel it's a shame that someone with obvious skill seems to have so little depth.