Running time: 114 minutes.

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INPulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's pop-culture classic, the young director lodged a spanner in the works. His film had no past, present or future, and the effect was electrifying: not only did it seem like a comment on the times . . . scatty, disjointed . . . but films ever since, from Memento to Babel, have carved their own warped time loops. There is one story, though, still playing out a conventional narrative . . . that of Tarantino himself. His tale is beginning to look like a toofamiliar storyline . . . the one that begins with success and ends in decline and fall. Is Quentin Tarantino the Orson Welles of his generation?

Tarantino's new film Death Proof is a puerile, sometimes-fun celebration of 1970s car-chase movies such as White Line Fever and Vanishing Point and a female revenge flick rolled into one. And it continues a decline in his filmmaking that became evident with the stylish but empty Kill Bill films.

Originally, this was one half of a three-hour movie package called Grindhouse, a celebration of the grungy exploitation movies Tarantino obsessed over as a youth. The homage was a reimagining of a night out at a Bmovie theatre and US critics were charmed (many lived it first time round). But it was a turkey at the box office. It is not hard to see why: the exploitation cinema of the 1970s means little to today's generation; the trash culture epitomised by these films . . . shock, sex, violence, gore and a general meaninglessness . . . has now become the mainstream culture.

So how does Death Proof look out of the Grindhouse context? It is a weak picture: the fanboy references from his trash-can collection of movies are certainly obscure. The irony is this is a Tarantino B-picture. The homage extends to the texture of the film:

designed to look like a cheap flick, it has scratches, nasty jump cuts and a boom mike even wanders into view. (Strangely, this all clears half way through and the film shines like new). Twentyseven minutes have been salvaged from the cutting room floor, but it would have been wiser to shave them. It is not even saved by Tarantino's signature peppy dialogue; here the snap and wit becomes a windy bore. Death Proof's only highlight is a rubberburning car chase. It has real cars, no special effects, and a woman strapped on the bonnet. It is great fun. You can sense Tarantino's delight at how 'cool' all this is.

The story follows two groups of girls: both of them stalked by Stuntman Dave (Kurt Russell), a psychopath who prowls in his black, 'death proof ' Dodge Charger. His mode of dispatch is to drive at their cars head-on at 200mph. The first gang . . . a gaggle of uber-cool, dope-smoking, harddrinking dames . . . are easy meat.

But the second female gang he targets include two film stunt drivers who decisively turn the tables.

When the girls go after Dave, it is meant to be read as punishment, not just for his psychotic behaviour, but for being a sexual dinosaur too. The chicks speed after him in their own supercharged car, and eventually knock an enormous dent in his impotent male ego. But it is difficult to swallow Tarantino's 'feminism';

even harder to believe he is subverting the genre in any way.

For up until this point, Death Proof has had its fun with the ladies.

Tarantino crams in more pervy shots of the ladies' behinds than a Robert Crumb comic book. While he also feels the need to share with us a rampant foot fetish. We get to live out the fantasy too of driving head-on into a carload of girls at 200mph. He doesn't show us this scene once, but four times. Each time, he cuts to another angle so we can see a different body part hurled through the air like dog meat. Tarantino can hardly contain his glee. And then there's the mangled features of Rose McGowan, whose face is destroyed off the dashboard of Mike's car. All that is needed are some garlic and onions and she has bolognese for a face. By the time Mike deserves to get it from the ladies, the film has pretty much had its own way with them too. You could call it a twisted equality.

Death Proof is certainly Tarantino's most honest movie . . .he is no longer pretending to be a serious filmmaker. But for a director with the rare cinematic ability to say so much, he increasingly says so little. From the Kill Bill films to this, there is a spiritual void in his work that comes not as a commentary of a wider vacuum, but simply because Tarantino the filmmaker has nothing to say other than to manufacture 'cool'. But cool used to be about substance, often carved from rebellion. His characters talk and do 'cool' things without any significance to their actions. The high king of trash culture has himself fallen victim to the rules of trash:

everything must be devalued.Perhaps that in itself is the ultimate commentary of the times.