Bleeds Tarantino.

Rating: 1/10 (26 January 2012)

Quentin Tarantino has long been one of, if not the, person in the film industry that I loathe the most. Despite him not directing this one, I had always avoided it just because I didn't want to deal with another one of his shallow disasters of a script. However, I figured at this point I should at least watch it for Gary Oldman's performance, since a ton of people consider it one of their favorites from him. Oldman did not disappoint. As a white pimp who tries to act black, he crafted yet another unique character in his long career, one totally removed from any other character he's ever played. He absorbs so deeply into this character and it serves as another example in the long line of roles that make him the first actor people think of when they hear the word "chameleon".
Unfortunately he's only in it for about ten minutes and then I had to deal with the rest of this awful mess, which is pretty much everything I hate in a Tarantino screenplay. If you're not going to do anything new then you should at least do the old things in an interesting way, but that sure isn't the case here. The whole thing is a pathetically thin old-as-bones story with Tarantino's trademark dialogue that so many people eat up but I find to be disastrously artificial and awkward. No actors would be able to pull off the kind of absurd, unrealistic dialogue that he feeds them here, but a lot of the cast here feels like they aren't even trying to make it seem anything but awful.
Some of the supporting players do all right in their brief screentimes, but Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette are terrible. It doesn't help that they have thin, completely one-dimensional characters (and in Arquette's case, a totally inconsistent one) but they just make matters worse with some abysmal portrayals. This one was a real chore; a completely shallow, needless exercise with some scenes that go on so long I thought I had died and fallen into hell.