With this much style, who needs content?

Rating: Null/10 (17 June 2004)

This film is a stage for Carradine, and it is so great to see him finally have full reign on a screen. This is one of Carradine's films that really crystallizes his style and attitude.
The plot is about as thin as projector film, but the characters are so grand it seems like a modern tribute to film noir anyway. Violence is often used in movies as a blatant substitute for an intelligent story, and Tarantino may be the poster child for using that device, but memorable characters are his (and his actors') great accomplishment. You can try to interpret the violence as metaphor for internal psychological dilemmas, and in this movie you see love ultimately win out over all the adrenalin addicted characters, but realistically Tarantino works from a gore-fetish basis and that is his most avid audience. That is the underlying vibe, but his films are more than that. Tarantino's films take on meaning simply by virtue of the characters and the interplay.
The film is vaguely reminiscent of Thelma and Louise, and I even see similarities in the methodology of Tarantino's films and Ridley Scott's.
It was great to see funny references to other films, too. There is this female character thrashing wildly on the floor in her death throws, uncannily like the replicant in (coincidentally) Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and it actually did turn out to be Daryl Hannah! I love NOT knowing everything about a film before seeing it. For the whole film I wondered if that could be her, and if Daryl Hannah could really still look that good.
It goes without saying that all the actors did great work, which is typical of Tarantino's films. Uma is a sex siren of the silver screen. Too many others to mention.