10 Bad Films By Great Directors

The point where Quentin Tarantino's fan-boy, meta machinations went too far is the point where he finally made a bad movie: 2007's Death Proof, a chaotic car-crash (literally) of a film that amounts to nothing more than a series of vignettes that scream out a boring, repetitive mantra: "I'm Quentin Tarantino, and I like B-Movies and Grindhouse".

Tarantino criticism is a curious thing. He often—even when making something masterful like Inglorious Basterds—gets accused of not being able to make a "grown-up" film, of not being able to curtail his cinephile's enthusiasm and bring in a serious picture with a run-time of under two hours. But to take that away from Tarantino is to lose his indelible mark on cinema; there are hundreds of serious filmmakers, but very few like QT, and his flourish should be cherished.

There is a point, however, when enough is enough, and Death Proof proved that. In lieu of an actual film, Tarantino presents a series of scratchy, inconsequential reels, nothing more than inferior versions of his own films and even of those schlock-horrors and B-pictures that he admires and references so. Worth watching only for the expertly staged head-on car collision, Death Proof bears few marks of Tarantino's unquestionable genius.

It's a D picture posing as B.