Over-rated, incoherent and boring

Rating: 3/10 (20 October 2003)

***MILD SPOILERS***
What a dissappointment, especially after the awesome trailer. I had several problems with this film:
1) I didn't care about any of the characters. There was no introduction to any of them (apart from the super-violent anime section introducing Lucy Liu), so I did not understand or care about their motivation. Why was any of this happening?
2) It lacked the dark humour of Tarantino's earlier films, especially in terms of the sparkling character dialogue (e.g. Samuel L Jackson & John Travolta in Pulp Fiction), of which there was none. The dark moments (e.g. the rapist hospital worker) were humour free and quite sickening.
3) Swapping the timelines around is an old Tarantino trick that worked brilliantly in Pulp Fiction, but added nothing to this movie except you knew the ending about 5 minutes into the film.
4) I got bored. The final battle lasts forever and becomes dull after the first few people get their limbs removed. The scenes where Uma Thurman convinces Sonny Chiba to make her a sword add nothing but minutes to the movie.
Why wasn't it edited down and made into a single, complete, BETTER movie? So dissappointed.