Ticked a number of wrong boxes

Rating: 5/10 (2 April 2008)

Much of this film annoyed me. I didn't mind the violence (mostly comic-book style apart from the initial vicious encounter with Vivica Fox). I didn't mind the switching of styles (anime, monochrome, Hong Kong kung fu movie etc.).
I did mind, however, that it was all style and no substance. At no point did I care in the slightest what happened to this woman because I knew nothing about her. And that lack of emotional investment fatally marred the movie for me, to the extent that I didn't bother to see Volume 2 when it came out (although I did see it later....) Plus it really annoyed me (really really really) that she should wheel her atrophied legs from her room to the hospital parking lot, spend long enough lying in the back of the truck for there to be a detailed flashback (I think the caption was "12 hours later") and, in those 12 hours, not only did no-one come looking for the missing patient with the 2 dead bodies in her room, but the wheelchair she left outside the truck vanished. Tarantino's strength is supposed to be his writing, and this distracting detail was the result of lazy, lazy scriptwriting.
But Volume 2? Aha...