 than I could review a book if I were only allowed to read every other page." Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News also complains that the film "has been unwisely chopped into two pieces -- the second is due in February -- when it really needed to be one long, delirious ride." Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe greets the "half a loaf" approach with a hiss. Other critics are not so upset, however. Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe and Mail even remarks that the ending "feels right." Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, who awards the film four stars, suggests that the story is really sort of incidental. "The movie is not about anything at all except the skill and humor of its making. It's kind of brilliant." That's a conclusion that is repeated in numerous reviews. A.O. Scott in the New York Times writes that it "is above all an exercise in style." Most of the reviews also allude to the barrels of blood in which the film is seemingly in awash. Cut Chris Kaltenbach in the Baltimore Sun observes that it's hard to take it seriously. "Yeah, there's plenty of onscreen violence," he writes, "but it would be hard to imagine more cartoonish carnage." Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post calls it "pure evil bliss ... mesmerizing." On the other hand, Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal writes that the film "inflicts intolerable cruelty on its characters, and on its audience -- though I'd like to believe that there is no mainstream audience for what has already been described, quite correctly, as the most violent movie ever released by an American studio." |
