Atrocious

Rating: 1/10 (6 December 2003)

I want two hours of my life back. Tarantino set out to create a homage to those martial arts movies he watched as a clerk in a video store. Sadly, he succeeded. This movie is plain and simply unwatchable. It has the same badly and unbelievable action scenes, extremely corny dialogue, and an almost complete lack of plot. If this movie had been a foreign import, instead of coming from a cult filmmaker, it would be sitting collecting dust in the C section of your video store, probably right next to the pornos. The Matrix and the Run Lola Run movies were cool in that they mixed genres in truly original and entertaining ways. Tarantino just makes a pathetic attempt at copying those films, trying to recover the aura of genious that he earned with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and later lost with all his other films. There's plenty of gimmicks in this one to spare: amputated limbs and decapitations that quickly become hilarious, anime thrown in for no reason, a final battle in black and white, and Tarantino's trademark of non-linear storytelling... take away that, and quite frankly, you will be left with not much more.