Pulp

A complete, unmitigated disaster, Pulp follows Michael Caine’s Mickey King as he agrees to ghostwrite the autobiography of a quirky actor/gangster (Mickey Rooney’s Preston Gilbert) and subsequently finds himself drawn into a series of oddball episodes. There’s little doubt, ultimately, that Pulp fares best in its relatively promising initial half hour, as filmmaker Mike Hodges, working from his own screenplay, kicks the proceedings off with a compelling opening stretch boasts stylish visuals and a typically compelling performance from Caine – which ensures, essentially, that the movie’s raft of questionable elements, including a continuing emphasis on eye-rollingly broad instances of comedy, are easy enough to overlook at the outset. It’s clear, then, that Pulp slowly-but-surely transforms into a seriously (and shockingly) interminable experience as it rolls into its meandering, aggressively irreverent midsection, with the increasingly nonsensical atmosphere paving the way for a second half that contains little, if anything, worth embracing and does, ultimately, ensure that the picture lurches and lumbers towards its almost hilariously anticlimactic and ineffective finale. The end result is an often impressively wrongheaded misfire that completely squanders its few positive attributes, and it’s difficult, certainly, not to wonder just what Hodges had hoped to achieve with this obnoxious and endless debacle.

1/2* out of ****