Crap.

Rating: 2/10 (17 April 2004)

This is a complete load of horse***t masquerading as a movie. Tedious, talky, derivative, full of itself. Not much different from Tarantino's other films. But at least "Vol. 1" was a load of finely polished crap. It may not have been profound, but at least it was entertaining. At times.
The problem with Tarantino is that he falls in love with his own cutesy dialogue, then refuses to cut it. The final scene -- the supposedly climactic battle with "Bill" -- was beyond disappointing, beyond anticlimactic. Two sad and pathetic human beings trying to talk tough, cliche after cliche, putting the audience to sleep in the process. Why talk at all?
What we have here is an actress standing in for a director (they look like brother and sister to me), acting out the director's revenge and bloodletting fantasies, demonstrating in the process the director's infantile contempt for humanity, his disregard and contempt for human life, and his reliance on other people's ideas in the absence of his own. The "Fistful of Dollars" soundtrack being thrown into the mix merely reminded me of the great Sergio Leone, the great Clint Eastwood. When I heard this great music, "Titoli," I believe it's called, at a packed midnight showing at the Cinerama Dome last night (and I consider screening this adolescent wank-fest at the Dome a total sin), I felt sad, thinking: this is what we've come to, this is what movies have deteriorated to: idiotic rehashes and "homages" to great and serious filmmaking of the past.

The film-noir credit sequence at the end was stupid, overlong and completely inappropriate. The "Q" and "U" credit made me want to puke. The final outtake of Uma demonstrated once again the sheer pointlessness of the entire thing.
"Let's do it again," she says. Another take? Hopefully not another movie.

I know Quentin; he seems like a nice guy. And he's a damn good filmmaker, to a degree. But he's an overgrown kid -- and a bloodthirsty one at that. Maybe he's a little bit retarded. Maybe some day he'll grow up. Maybe someday he'll actually put his creative energy into something that matters.

Maybe.