A hitman, Jack, (Cusack) is tasked by his boss Dragna (DeNiro) to pick up a bag and deliver it to a motel in the middle of the Louisiana bayou. His instructions? Wait in room thirteen, and don't look in the bag. The problem is the small town local weirdos won't leave him alone...
If you took a sixteen year old off of his Ritalin, got him high on weed, and
handed him a typewriter, this is the script you'd come up with. You can hear the giggles between puffs all over this story, and it's not to its benefit.
A six-foot hooker in a blue wig, a homicidal midget, and a tattooed black man in an eyepatch do not make for a unique or interesting story. It's like a carnival side-show, thrown together for no reason, intended to pique your interest but instead just gets tiresome. Add the hotel manager with an unnatural attachment to his dead mother's wheelchair, and it's just sad.
Since Cusack's character is mainly a taciturn tough guy, the first half hour has nearly no dialogue whatsoever. The rest is a melange of whatever crazy crap they can throw into the script and screw with his objective.
For the counts, one holy crap moment when eyepatch gets dragged on the pavement, and an eyeroll in the Sheriff's office during the attempted rape scene at a bit of dialogue so cliched, I should have turned it off. Yeah. You've been warned. But believe me, I hated this movie way before that point.
To say that you'd like this movie if you liked "Pulp Fiction" would be an insult to "Pulp Fiction" and you. You can tell it was maybe what they were trying to go for, but it just ended up bizarre with none of Tarantino's flair. I give it a generous two out of five stars, and I only say its generous because of the awkward, artificial, and terribly acted final scene between Rivka and Dragna shown in a flashback as she reaches Dragna's lawyer's office. That should have knocked it down to one star.
Avoid this movie at all costs.
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