Enormously Overrated

Rating: 5/10 (17 August 2006)

The proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating. The proof of the movie is in the watching. Most of the top 250 IMDb movies have kept me glued to my seat--with this one I found my mind wandering to that jigsaw puzzle I hadn't finished or the possibility of some popcorn. I found I had very little interest in the characters or in what was going on.
I asked myself why. Technically the film is very good. The actors all hit their marks and Samuel L. Jackson is particularly outstanding. I liked Maria de Madeiros also as Bruce Willis' wife Fabienne. The camera work is occasionally interesting, as the long scene where we watch Bruce Willis listen unemotionally to Marsellus go on. Interesting, certainly, but rather pointless.
Indeed, that's the problem: so much of what goes on is pointless. It's a big long shaggy dog story, told by one of those irritating people who can't get the story straight and have to keep going back: "Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about that. Well, you know what I was telling you before . . ." I tried to find some justification for the higgledy-piggledy way in which this story is told. It does result in the best scene being the last one. But if this scene was the point then why not design the script so that the action is seen to be moving toward this goal and cut out everything that happens afterward? In the end I don't think Tarentino knew what story he was telling and that's why so much is so pointless.
The scenes of Butch attempting to control his temper, of his dilemma whether to help Marsellus, and the final scene in the restaurant are all good and entertaining as far as they go but they don't fall into a coherent framework. And the rest is quite dull.
The dialogue is not witty or clever although it occasionally has its moments. The constant profanity is as pointless as the rest; the point of profanity is presumably to emphasize what one is saying, but if everything is emphasized, nothing is. The mind becomes numbed by it. It's like someone who shouts all the time. Eventually you stop listening. The quotes give you a pretty good idea of what the dialogue is like: when "Shut the f*ck up, fat man!" is listed as a memorable quote, you know how inane the conversation is.
That this poorly composed script should have won an Oscar is a pretty clear indictment of the Academy.