Didn't live up to critics' rave reviews...

Rating: 5/10 (13 August 1999)

Despite a decent plot and dialogue, this film did almost nothing for me with the exception of irritating me tremendously. Of the cast, at least three were blatant Steve Buscemi mimics while another might as well have been a contestant in a Dennis Leary wannabe contest. The characters seem to be overtly modeled, directly mind you, after characters from Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Overall the movie seemed like a weak attempt at matching Tarentino's genius character development from those films. Not to mention the less obvious Kubrick rip off with their version of Nadsat (the dialect used in Clockwork Orange). During one scene a bartender is telling a story using a dialect consisting of words meaning things other than their conventional definitions. While this definitely has potential, as Kubrick demonstrated, the director chose to use subtitles for the bartender's dialect so the audience would be better able to understand him. It could have been better if a similar dialect was used throughout the movie and the audience was forced to learn the language in order to understand the dialogue. Aside from these irritating facets of the movie, it was generally good. The plot shifts were creative as was the overall cinematography. I might have given it a 6 or 7 based on the plot, but because of the rip off characters and dialogue, I have to give it a 4. It's worth seeing if you don't think you'll have similar grievances as I did, but if you watch a lot of movies, this will probably serve to annoy you as much as it did me.