Hyper-stylized Japanese spaghetti western from director Takashi Miike is pretty entertaining – despite a hokey framing device starring an embarrassing Quentin Tarantino. The story is nothing extraordinary – but the visual imagery and above-average production values are superb, and the action scenes are excellent – the climactic shoot-out in particular. But the post-modern cinematic references were laid on a bit thick, as were the cartoonish sound effects. It was a questionable choice to have Japanese actors speak English, a lot of the dialogue was incredibly awkward.