Kill Tarantino

But Tarantino's films aren't merely bad, they also render reasonably intelligent people totally vacuous and stupid. They go in to see Kill Bill in full possession of their faculties and come out spouting a load of gibberish about popcultural synergy, the purity of the martial-arts genre and how Tarantino is pushing back the frontiers of contemporary cinematic art.

That's if they're film buffs; if they're ordinary cinema-goers under the age of 30, they may well even lack a frame of reference at all within which to gauge quite how awful these films are, something for which Tarantino himself is in a large part responsible. Because he isn't a film director per se; he hasn't an original idea in his head. He stands in the same relation to proper film directors as a masturbating video-store clerk (which is, of course, what he once was). Tarantino is a pastiche-popping pornographer, who cuts together clips of ultraviolence, seeming cool and smutty talk, all of which he has seen in other films, to get his jollies.

WHAT few redeeming features his earlier works may have had, such as a passable feel for streetwise dialogue ( Reservoir Dogs), a comic editing technique (Pulp Fiction), and a perverse sense of the elegiac (Jackie Brown), are completely cancelled out by the excesses of the Kill Bill films.

I don't even want to do Tarantino and his pathetic accomplices the honour of recounting the narrative of the second "volume" of this exercise in trashpedalling, and frankly I don't need to, because there isn't a plot to speak of. In the first volume we saw the Thurman character, on waking from a four-year coma after having been shot in the head by the eponymous Bill, inter alia, go on a revengekilling spree. In this second volume she tracks him down, and oh, we learn that they were lovers and the child she was carrying when she was shot is his. Wow.

The first volume gave employment to hundreds of Japanese with its multiple slaying of Yakuza gangsters; the second does the same for the Chinese, by having our Uma taught kung fu by a Chinese master, although why this had to be shot in China is absolutely beyond me, since the only exteriors are of some trees and a long stone staircase. The first volume featured gushes of blood like geysers every time a limb was severed, the second has such treats as a live burial, snake bites to the face and the occasional wanton shotgun blast. And, oh yes, plenty more girl-on-girl sword-fighting.

As for Tarantino's vaunted skills as a screenwriter, at the showing I went to the film was stopped about an hour in because of "difficulties with the sound", but I just wish that when they restarted it they'd managed to do something about the dialogue.

Taking the two volumes together, at the climax of four hours of allegedly dramatic cinema, the payoff-line was: "You can be a real c*** sometimes."

I dare say that Tarantino would justify all this drivel with recourse to the genres he has adapted, from manga comics and martial-arts movies, to spaghetti westerns and film noir, but the truth is that it's not clever - it's just woefully big.

At the end of Kill Bill Volume 2 it did occur to me who might actually enjoy this film (so long as the graphic violence was toned down a little) and that's my swashbuckling six-year-old son. As for the titles, with their roll call of infamous clapper-loaders, they're enough to keep my old dad spinning in his grave for an eternity.