A film where love is unbelievable, the characters are unlikely, and the action scenes are brutal and quite intense.
This is one of those films that you shouldn't watch with your family: it's full of violent scenes, foul dialogue full of profanity, several sex scenes, among other heavy features. The story isn't exactly nice either: during his birthday, a seemingly ordinary man meets a seductive woman and the two get very involved. We learn that she is a prostitute, and was hired to be with him that night. They decide to escape, but are forced to kill her pimp and take with them a suitcase full of pure cocaine.
For me, the film's biggest problem wasn't the violence (Tarantino uses it regularly and is considered brilliant), but rather the implausibility of the story: I wouldn't believe in love at first sight with a prostitute, I find the idea implausible, and the same can be said about the idea of a frail boy, with a perfectly ordinary life, becoming in a few hours a brutal murderer and potential drug dealer. These are things that don't fit, but that the film takes advantage of to create a kind of “Romeo and Juliet Bang Bang”.
There are several well-known names in the cast. For me, the best performance came from Gary Oldman, who is extraordinarily good in the role of a violent pimp. I wish that his participation was not so brief. Patricia Arquette is sexy when she's almost naked, and that was put to full use. As an actress, she did what she could, but she was given such bad material and such an unbelievable character that she couldn't do much. In turn, Christian Slater is not a good actor. At least, I think that he lost itself a lot after “Name of the Rose”. Here, he keeps the same persona he presented in “Heathers”, but without such an intelligent script to base it on. The actor did the job that was possible with bad material and a very bad character. Chris Walken is good in the role of the big villain: he knows how to be cold and appear threatening. Val Kilmer and Brad Pitt make brief appearances, but I doubt they want to remember this work, where they were very far from the shape we are used to.
Technically, the film stands out for the avalanche of good special effects it used in the action and shooting scenes, which are deeply crafted and stylized. Fans of action films will definitely enjoy this, and the climactic scene is worthy of an anthology. The rest ends up not really interesting and not having much relevance.