This smug little kaleidoscope of low lives had a lot of potential.

But like a lot of its writer's works has aged horribly as it can no longer corner the market on movies with a zany style and now must viewed in terms of its substance, not just its style.

The meandering nature of the narrative really has no narrative: there is no intrigue or sense of development. It's not an anthology movie but it almost is and therefor each scene can only really be enjoyed as a thing in itself without context and so lacks both the ground work and the sense of consequence that would make them classics.

It's sort of sad to watch it desperately just try to produce iconic or quotable moment after moment rather than apply itself to something a real back bone. It's sort of enjoyable for its sheer bombasticity but it gets old really quickly with no characters I want to root for which would be fine if only there was some sense of pay off on any of the character's fates.

Some people jack themselves off to this movie's freshness but I think this is another case of something that was fresh for its time ageing horribly and its enduring cult status is a mixture of nostalgia, emperor's new clothes and people not willing to look behind the make up to see what a pandering little flick this really is.

It has its moments but it never seems to aspire to more than a sequence of moments rather than a movie in the familiar sense. You could argue its a meditation of fate and consequence but that just sound a nicer way of saying it wasn't thought through well.

It's not just tedious for long stretches, it kind of annoys me.