The appeal of this movie escapes me

Rating: 5/10 (8 October 1999)

This oddly intertwined series of tales is chiefly about two professional assassins, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), and their misadventures in the world of murder, crime, and taking the boss's wife out to eat. (Trust me, this is not as funny as it sounds). Haphazardly intermixed with this is the story of the boss, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) and of Butch (Bruce Willis), a boxer who refuses to throw a fight for Wallace and thus earns his enmity.
Some things are not wrong with PULP FICTION. I do not believe, as some do, that it is intended to glorify violence and drug abuse. It does play both these things for comic effect, in what I found a very tasteless, vulgar, and unfunny style, but I don't think Tarantino was trying to tell the audience that violence and drug abuse are actually fun and beneficial; inconvenient and inglorious consequences of both are shown quite graphically. And the acting by Jackson, Rhames, and, yes, Willis is pretty darn good.
Nevertheless, PULP FICTION bored me out of my mind. I was not interested in the characters, because none of them is sympathetic; none feels about the world or reacts to it in any way remotely approaching my own. And much of the movie is spent in long dialogue that does nothing to advance the plot. To be fair, Tarantino does have an ear for realistic, earthy-sounding phrases. The lines never sound artificial, forced or strained; they do sound just like the spontaneous banalities that form the backbone of real people's conversations. But I don't listen to strangers' banal conversations, because they're boring if I don't know the people. And that's exactly how boring the conversations in PULP FICTION are.
PULP FICTION's genius is generally said to lie in its accomplishments as a black comedy. Well, whatever floats your boat. I got very few laughs out of this picture. Interestingly, I always find my friends' re-enactments of their favorite scenes from PULP FICTION to be much funnier than seeing the scenes themselves. I was amused twice in the final tale by Tarantino's spoofing of movie cliches, as where Jules urged Honeybunny to "stay calm, point the gun at me," and where a hapless gunman misses Jules and Vincent with an entire magazine at point blank range, much to all parties' amazement. But aside from that, the comedy eluded me. I don't know how anyone could hail lower than lowbrow humor like Christopher Walken's scene as being some kind of comic genius. Furthermore, realistically brutal violence and comedy don't mix well for my taste.
Tarantino does have some imagination handling the camera. For instance, Vincent at one point is told that Marsellus Wallace had a man thrown off a building for massaging Mrs. Wallace's feet; later, when Vincent meets Mrs. Wallace on orders to take her to a restaurant, the camera never leaves Mrs. Wallace's feet.
But Tarantino's imagination often is no more than showing off. The film's structure appeals to the sort of over-literate viewer for whom the word "nonlinear" is synonymous with "brilliant" and "artistic." Not to be a spoilsport, but there's a good reason most movie scripts are arranged in a linear fashion: that happens to be the way time flows. I'm not saying you can't tell a good nonlinear story, but there'd better be a reason for it. And I cannot tell what Tarantino thinks he accomplished by mixing at least five (counting the opening scene) different time sequences together in a seemingly random order. I was not confused, but many others were, and I don't see what Tarantino gained in exchange for losing them. One reviewer has suggested this device enabled Tarantino to put Jules' "redemption" at the end, thus finishing the movie on a positive note. If this is so, then the conclusion is just as manipulative and intellectually dishonest as any standard tacked-on Hollywood feel-good ending.
Not that the ending is really bad; in fact I gave the movie an extra half star for its ending, as I finally became interested in one of the characters. I would have liked to find out whether Jules succeeded in leaving the criminal life. Of course, I take self-confessed "redemptions" with a grain of salt, but since Jules seems to be uncertain himself about whether he'll kick the criminal habit, I can live with that. But redeemed or not, Jackson couldn't completely redeem this frequently tedious, sometimes nauseating, and rarely funny two and a half hours.
Rating: ** out of ****.