Time for a step into genre weirdness as we look at what can only be described as the closest we’ll ever get to an ‘official’ Tarantino knock-off. Writer/director Roger Avary worked quite closely with Tarantino himself in the ‘90s, doing both credited and uncredited work on Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and even Tarantino’s writer-only gigs with True Romance and Natural Born Killers. With Tarantino seemingly hitting the twilight of his career, given his latest felt like a loving goodbye letter to the medium he adores, I’d argue that there might be some use out of a production like this as a further testament to that legacy. But that’s not the result we get, though.
Pulp Fiction in particular springs to mind quite often while watching this, particularly the story of Butch and Fabienne with how much French influence is in here. But it’s a weird and ill-fitting kind of influence, though, with non-native speakers being taught French recurrently in-universe, and the main villain’s whole schtick is that he sports an atrociously bad accent that is itself fake as a showing of how fucked-up said villain is. Combine that with the occasional bits of French music (which serve as a nice reprieve from the stock orchestral snippets that show up) and how the lead character’s daughter is concentrated French quirkiness (she can literally make herself invisible for reasons never even glanced at), and it feels rather out-of-place.
There’s also the style on display, which taps into the same exploitation worship that makes up a hefty amount of Tarantino’s artistic DNA, with a lot of violence and unsavoury character dialogue to show off its ‘grit’. Except, unlike with Tarantino, there’s no sense of joy or understanding coming out of the movie-loaf that is the story. As sporadically hilarious as the gore can get, and as entertaining as some of the performances are, this has an unshakeable feeling of going through the motions, employing this eclectic style out of a sense of obligation rather than passion.
The entire conversation concerning this film as a piece of art also makes for a bit of metatextual content with Nina Dobrev’s Chloe and her career as an artist, with a sizeable amount of the film devoted to a gallery show inspired by her husband’s stint in prison. I don’t know how much of my own background as a critic is informing my perspective here, but the way it depicts art gallery patrons and critics responding to the art is a bit… tacky. I mean, they directly bring up how the art itself might be influenced by the work of others (if the film wants to bring that to my attention, then yeah, I’m gonna keep bringing up Tarantino), their dialogue turns the critics in 'we hate everything for the sake of hating it' straw-men, and the way it’s resolved in the finale feels particularly mean-spirited. Either accept that there are negative critiques alongside the more positive ones, or throw them both away; you can’t have it both ways.
The only real positive I have for this is with the acting, and even that comes about through strange channels. Luke Bracey in the lead as the ex-con safe cracker Red might be his best role yet, although that’s more a comment on how bad his script picks were in the 2010s, and for as thin as it ultimately is, his character arc of trying to break away from his old ways made for a couple of nice moments. Then we have the inclusion of Crispin Glover as Luc, the aforementioned villain with the intentionally bad French accent. He is in full-on Charlie’s Angels mode here, making for a wobbly but intimidating presence, who definitely keeps attention on the screen when the rest of the production is unable to.
But even with that kind of perplexingly watchable presence in here, this still isn’t all that great. It’s a pretty limp bit of neo-exploitation, one that runs unfortunately thin in a lot of the areas that count (spectacle, characters, soundtrack… especially the soundtrack), and it’s only because of elements that rationally shouldn’t even be here that I refrain from calling it outright bad. It makes the blatant hostility towards critics look like Avary knows how lacklustre this is, but is too defensive to accept that and wanted to pre-emptively shoot the messenger. It’s kind of pathetic, to be brutally honest.
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