A video game come-to-life

Rating: Null/10 (12 October 2003)

I enjoyed the first hour and a half of this film and then suddenly, as the violence escalated, I just found myself getting sleepy.
The film's fighting sequences are a near exact copy of those in the X-box games my husband likes to play - with the characters dressed in fighter outfits the player can select: the geisha in white, the Japanese schoolgirl, the head-to-toe yellow leather jumpsuit, the black suit with the eye mask... The blood spurting like a fountain out of the cut limbs, the large room in which the fight happens - all taken out of the games... This makes the fighting the most original you've seen in movies so far, but it works for the first hour and a half, as I said, and then the joke grows stale...
Oh, and the film is very self-referential: you'll recognize the funny Tarantino signatures from the other movies he's made, particularly Pulp Fiction - the square drawn in the air, Uma Thurman waking up out of a coma with a start, absurdly silly dialogue (cold-blooded killers calling each other 'bunny rabbit')...
Before this movie started, several trailers were shown, among them one for the latest Leslie Nielsen spoof, with some really funny references to other movies, as usual.
Well, the Tarantino film that followed had that feeling of a spoof, probably because the plot was pretty irrelevant, and I realised Tarantino is no longer an original genius, he's lost his touch for the original, he can now only do derivative stuff.
Which is a shame, because we've reached the point where nobody can make an action movie any more that is compelling enough for an adult audience.