Stylish, Arty and Gratuitous - I'll highlight paragraphs with spoilers

Rating: 8/10 (2 June 2005)

Beautifully stylised and I loved the significant colour additions to what is otherwise a black and white film. My wife and I talked for ages afterwards about the specifics of the colours. Then there's the bouncing around in time, as most noticeably utilised before in Pulp Fiction. These factors being the reasons I called the film arty. I can imagine people considering such a gratuitous film being unable to gain such an adjective, but IMHO it does.
Tight plot with no big holes and the slightly disparate stories connected nice and subtly at times, which is again a similarity to the style of Pulp Fiction.
Reasonable acting, nothing more. It would be a bit difficult to play it too straight with all the over the top action. As a guide, I'd liken the level of action and violence to that of Kill Bill.
Minorist of minor spoiler after the '*' :-
In addition to the Pulp Fiction time-jumps and the Kill Bill death toll, you could also see where Tarantino influenced the dialogue. He clearly wrote the lines for one of the hapless henchmen - * the one repeatedly berating his colleague in long drawn out monologues for failing to steal inconspicuous getaway cars. Very funny snippets.
I've never seen the comics this is based on and it was the cast list and the slick trailer that easily convinced me to go and see it. If I'm honest, it didn't live up to the trailer, but then not many films do.
I didn't want the film to end, which is always a good sign, but it wasn't good enough to make me really, really like it.
Major Spoiler in this paragraph :-
My only thing I disliked (although it was quite a error in my view) in the film was the very ending, where Hartigan decides the only way to protect Nancy is to kill himself so the bad guy won't have a motive to go after her anymore. Clearly that should really have been plan 'B'. Plan 'A' would be to go and kill the bad guy (perfect result) or die trying (no worse than plan 'B'). And who's to say that there weren't hit men currently still on the lookout for her? *shrug*
Closing comment: It was nice to see Frodo embracing his Gollum side.