A very poor effort.

Rating: 3/10 (11 February 2004)

This is a meandering and tawdry film that keeps you wondering why you are watching it at all. The director had some good films previously...naturally that is the reason, faith. But the strengths of his other films are absent here: there are no colourful characters (most are downright implausible), no quirky dialogue (almost no dialogue, actually); there is some action but no suspense; it is like watching a video game played very well from over someone's shoulder.
I don't know if the few semi-serious scenes are meant to be sincere, because they reek of falsity and dreadful cliché. Poor Sonny Chiba, he looks like he's doing a Pepsi commercial! There is a *great* amount of gore, and in fact almost every scene has a particularly nasty element to it; this is much more in the vein of 'Natural Born Killers' than 'Pulp Fiction.' But story, where is the story?
What story there is, is terribly full impossibilities, too many to list. After a while you just have to guess that it is a kind of dream that doesn't adhere to any reality (except the director's indulgence). That's rarely a good time.
Did it really take him nearly a decade to make this? If so, Quentin really should learn to make better use of his time. Much of this film could have been shot in a weekend (with all the contrived title cards and video effects wrapped up in a month). Much has been made about choreographed fight scenes, but later I read the script was discarded and much of it was done freeform. This seems very likely, as most of the fighters just look like stunt men standing around waiting to fall when Uma taps them. There's just no skill here; no discernable authentic martial arts being done.

Overall, an insipid and unsatisfying film.