Shallow, unintelligent and pretentious

Rating: 3/10 (5 November 2003)

Quentin Tarantino seems to concentrate his movies very much along the lines of "cool" and "tough" and pulpy storylines and characters. To me, his scripts come across as done by someone who reads too many B-grade comic books, mainly because his movies have very similar content.
The story is very thin, and to sum up the what you see on the screen most of the time: there's a bunch of cookie-cutter emotionally retarded tough-guys who compete over who can deliver the coolest and toughest lines to each other and wave their shiny guns at each other with the right sort of swagger. That sort of thing is just so ho-hum, clichéd, and juvenile that I felt like tuning out right away.
Mixed into this macho posturing is some gratuitious violence (even to the point of being repulsive at times, for example when Mr. Blonde gets his way with the cop) and a couple of "cool" stories in the vein of Pulp Fiction's story about McDonald's in France (what depth). Too bad it's pretty much gloss over content. The only flash of intelligence in this movie is right at the beginning where Mr. Pink delivers his speech on tipping. That's what kept me somewhat interested at first. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there.
This sort of movie doesn't appeal to me at all, although I'm sure it has some appeal to teenagers who consider the like of _The Fast and the Furious_ to be "cool". Me, I guess I'm just too old (27) to be impressed by this sort of trashy stuff. Had I seen it ten years ago, my review then might have been somewhat different.