The most ludicrously inflated reputation of any film

Rating: 1/10 (18 December 2005)

The hugely overrated trivial chatting, the grotesque violence, the moral vacuum, the deadly slowness, the length --- about an hour too long --- make it incomprehensible today how this picture ever made people rave the way they did on this board.
The greatest film ever? Excuse me, this is a feature film that says nothing, depicts no authentic feelings or character development, is grossly self-indulgent and filled with idiotically implausible situations, such as people firing powerful handguns repeatedly, simultaneously and then hanging around chatting as if nobody would ever report the firing and summon the law.
Perhaps the most implausible character of all is played by Mr Tarantino, who shouts at the two hoodlum killers as if they were playmates from school and complains that his wife will divorce him if she returns from work to find a car in the garage containing a man with his head blown off.
Where is the moral compass of the people who revere this schoolboy nonsense? Nobody in the film is remotely principled, and nor is anyone (except possibly the pawnbroker) actually evil. The scene where he releases a leather-studded sadist from a cage is possibly the most unbelievable rubbish ever deployed in a Hollywood feature.
"It's only entertainment," I hear people protest. Well the difference between Mr Tarantino and film-makers of stature is that they are capable of entertaining while instructing, and of integrating the two.