Unimaginative Timbertino

Rating: Null/10 (20 November 2003)

Oh my God, what is it with you people? EMBARRASSING is the right word for most of the reactions to tarantino's new movie, which was boring and lame for almost the entire 111 minutes, not moving. Commentators felt compelled to compare it to Matrix for absurd reasons but they were right in that both movies are equally overrated and hyped. (I AM talking about the first of the trilogy, never saw the sequels because number one clearly explained that all there was going to come up was even more silly coats, sunglasses and a trigger-happy karate kid saving the REAL world, reloaded bullshit ha ha!)
Now tarantino did produce some decent moments of film, and of course he recycled some of his better ideas in kill bill (the res. doggish `I shoulda been black mamba', the pulpish biblical revenge prattle etc.) As for the talk of kill bill being a movie about movies it has to be said once and for all that even the lamest okami or zatoichi flick is more entertaining and exciting than this. One major problem of the movie of course was Uma, whom some people may like as an actor and whom quentin evidently is very fond of, but who simply can't deliver one single move or even glance in a convincing fashion. I am not even talking about the admittedly difficult iaido-work (every single opponent our heroine engaged looked better with the sword than she did), I am talking about those badly performed justin timberlake jumps and the fact that two months in the gym might have done her some good. The monty pythonesque kitchen fight in the beginning was nothing but an eye-roller, but that was true for most of the movie. My aunt Jemima would have done a better job with the help of some computer work and a baggy bruce lee costume, that's for sure. The sound engineers tried to make up for the lack of verve with loads of noises, but hey, who is afraid of dinosaurs that roar like Kellogg's lions? The music doesn't deserve any comments, anybody who didn't expect spanish tunes or at least Andean pan-pipes in the final snow-covered japanese garden scene (well, it didn't look like snow to me, actually) hadn't understood quentin's rather half-assed post-modern gimmickry. There were some remarkable moments in the movie, though, the animation sequence was perfect and should have set the pace for the movie, but it didn't. It was intense and it revealed all the things kill bill was not. The barefoot band was awesome, but where were they when things got interesting? Gone, like every hope mr. TIMBERTINO (or mr. Brown) could pull this off.