In one word, awful

Rating: 1/10 (24 November 2003)

I caught Mr. Tarantino's latest piece at the Stockholm Film Festival and I was greatly disappointed, to put it mildly. This film is a piece of sh*t. There's just no two ways about it. It stinks.
The characters are flatter than racoons on a highway, and the depth and development of the story is put to shame by most Italian operas. There is no trace of the intricate story building of Pulp Fiction, nor of the empathy for the characters sometimes found in Jackie Brown.
All we get here is an endless orgy of über-cool nasty people in designer clothing cutting off feet on highly stylized stage sets, with fountaineous gushes of blood the high-point of the fun.
The action scenes are tired, bleak copies only. They have already been done better in countless asian genre movies. Uma Thurman fights a large number of black-suited opponents at the same time? Well, wasn't that already done in Matrix II? It's not really funny the second time around, is it?
There is no longer any originality in Tarantino's work. Everything is borrowed, everything is an hommage to something or other. But with no focus of its own, no vision to guide it along, the movie just disintegrates into a hodge-podge of stolen scenes and stolen ideas. Kill Bill just doesn't have a "soul". It is empty, void, a pointless excursion into excessive, stupid violence.
With this movie, Tarantino has finally proven his critics right. Now, he really is just another panderer of speculative ultra violence.