Rating:

Quentin Tarantino has a style, and Robert Rodriguez has a style.Long before Grindhouse, they created a film which gave away their individual preferences as filmmakers, and that film was From Dusk Til Dawn.

Tarantino likes dusty, contemporary spaghetti western-tinged crime stories, usually involving a road trip, full of verbose characters rambling at each other before suddenly drawing their guns and shooting it out.

Rodriguez likes hackneyed dialogue and ridiculously over-the-top action sequences, usually involving monsters with heavy makeup.

So in Dawn, which was written by Tarantino and directed by Rodriguez, it’s not surprising to find that it’s a tale of two styles.

We open on the Gecko brothers, recent outlaws on the lam, headed for Mexico. They’re holding up a liquor store when a meddlesome Texas Ranger appears, and they’re forced to shoot everyone in the joint and blow it up.

Then it’s a short jaunt across Texas to the Mexican border, where the brothers (played by George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino) abscond in a broken family’s motor home, with the family held hostage.

This was vintage Tarantino—each character had an elaborate backstory and a strong will to be on top of the situation. There are flaws here, and they’re self conscious. The modern Tarantino, a la Kill Bill, seems content to come up with snappy dialogue and have it spewing out of one-dimensional, cartoonish characters. Such was not the case this early in his career, and the first half of the film is the better for it.

Of course the second half is where the heavy hand of director Rodriguez comes into play. Finally having made it into Mexico, the Gecko brothers and their hostages have to wait in the Titty Twister bar until the outlaws they’re there to meet show up.

Little do they know that the bar is full of gruesome vampires, a gorgeous temptress played by Salma Hayek, and a leather-clad badass named “Sex Machine,” played by none other than Joe Montegna.

The otherwise tame and reality-based movie takes a hard turn for the absurd, as a vampiric band starts to play instruments made out of body parts, Shaft starts eating people, and creepy Tarantino uses his clout as a filmmaker to force a young Salma Hayek to give him a foot-flavored lapdance and champagne cocktail.

These may sound like fun things, but trust me: they’re annoying and, worse—boring.

The film isn’t meant to be taken seriously—and thank god for that, because it’s impossible to do so. Tarantino and Rodriguez are just having fun here, and that’s the main problem. Audiences don’t always think the things that two best friends think are “awesome” actually are.

(Ignore, dear reader, what implications the sentence I just wrote may have for this very website. This website isn’t a movie, goddammit, and different rules apply.)

The film starts generically, but is kept alive by whatever original flavor Tarantino brings to it, for better or for worse. But by the end, we’re looking at our watches, and not only is everything an inside joke—we don’t even care enough to be curious.

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