Putrid potboiler glorifying gangsterism with comic book characters

Rating: Null/10 (20 July 2005)

This has got to be Tarentino's worst and hopefully it will stay that way. This is nothing more than a hyped-up one-dimensional trip down every type of cliché in comic book and kung fu movie history. There's nothing here that resembles any sort of humanistic vision, moreso it's only what is less evil than what else. It's fatalism at it's worst, with a nihilistic vision of humanity. It celebrates the rotton core of the criminal mind. It says that those who kill are the wonders of the world, to be admired and emulated. The rest of us folks who don't are bumbling, dim-witted buffoons. This is what can be expected from an individual who was mindlessly inundated with senseless psycho horror films, cheesy outlandish Kung Fu crud, simplistic comic book story lines, all of these saying that gore is good, might makes it right, and everything human can be explained in a one-dimensional characterization. Those who rave about how great this is, do so merely because it is an extremely slick presentation, completely realized pulp novel, and is just as empty-headed as all of those pulp novels that have long gone into trash incinerators and landfills where they belong. This is violence only for the sake of violence, without any of the nuance and subtlety of the great film storytellers, such as Hitchcock or Kurosawa, who knew that a small dose or a mere hint of violence was all that was necessary to augment a good story.