Ray Lindenberg

What a slow-moving 200+ minute clunker this thing is! To begin with, whoever thought uselessly cameo-casting Al Pacino as an aging Jewish movie director, with a hint of a Bernie Sanders Brooklyn accent and all, should be torched with a flame thrower. That was just one of a series of unnecessary and unexplainable excesses that made this movie so painful to watch. Xeroxing into this movie Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt, from my favorite movie of this millennium, Inglorious Basterds) and plopping him into the mix as a stretch to see if lightning would strike again was another lazy faux pas, along with the attempt at wink-wink cutesy references to the Basterds masterpiece. I get it ... Tarantino is talented and clever — and has earned the right to take us for a ride through his limitless imagination ... bullets, blood and all. But this one was a pointless slog designed to use up my reverence for him just he could hear us say ‘ha-ha - he’s at it again, and what a ballsy genius, at that’ - but this was a bridge too far. And that dumb exclamation point at the end of the movie, after the credits had and 95% of the audience had left the building, of adding a pseudo outtake of DiCaprio delivering a cigarette commercial as a curtain call to his character’s performance was again totally useless, un-clever and un-thrilling that served to underscore how misguided QT was in conjuring up this production drivel and underestimating how much we’re willing to put up with his ‘lookie what I can do’ excesses. What a Dog this flick was ... and I don’t mean the Reservoir kind.