From Dusk Till Dawn

From Dusk Till Dawn follows criminal brothers Seth (George Clooney) and Richie Gecko (Quentin Tarantino) as they kidnap a family (Harvey Keitel’s Jacob, Juliette Lewis’ Katherine, and Ernest Liu’s Scott) and make their way to Mexico, with bloody chaos ensuing after all hell eventually breaks loose within the walls of a sleazy south-of-the-border strip club. Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, working from Tarantino’s screenplay, opens From Dusk Till Dawn with an electrifying pre-credits sequence revolving around a robbery gone horribly wrong, and there’s little doubt that the movie, in its first half, comes off as an engrossing thriller that benefits substantially from Tarantino’s predictably captivating dialogue and a series of uniformly compelling performances – with, in terms of the latter, Clooney delivering exactly the sort of consistently charismatic and engaging work with which he’s come to be associated. There’s little doubt, as well, that an impossible-to-predict development around the picture’s midway point provides an uncommonly shocking jolt for the viewer, and the movie’s second half, which couldn’t possibly be more different from everything preceding it, stands as an above-average foray into the horror genre that boasts a plethora of spellbinding set-pieces (and even a few now-iconic characters, including Salma Hayek’s Santanico Pandemonium and Tom Savini’s Sex Machine) – which does, in the end, cement From Dusk Till Dawn‘s place as an unpredictable, thoroughly engrossing bit of balls-to-the-wall filmmaking.

***1/2 out of ****