The result, especially in the scenes involving Bruce Willis as a nervy boxer, can be long patches of dialogue that must have tickled Tarantino but will not necessarily resonate for anyone else.
This movie gets its charge not from action pyrotechnics but from its electric barrage of language, wisecracks and dialogue, from the mordant '70s classicism of its long-take camera style and its smart, offbeat, strangely sexy cast.
At 153 minutes, the movie does occasionally flirt with tedium, but the risk is worth it: The whole is finally greater than the sum of its pulpy parts. What could have been an anything-goes pastiche has surprising rigor and narrative clarity.
Back in 1994, I was a rookie young reviewer cutting my teeth and slowly losing the will to live watching the bloated Hollywood fare of Forrest Gump, The Flintstones and Lassie. Then, along came Pulp Fiction, swaggering with cool and bending all the rules.
It's hard to imagine any viewer leaving this extravagantly demented, 2 1/2 hour low-life lalapalooza without carrying away at least a few indelible moments.
It resurrects John Travolta from "Look Who's Talking" hell, it makes Bruce Willis into a serious actor and it honors the power and fancy of intelligent dialogue (written by the director himself).