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"A crash course in revenge" – the tagline quite literally tells you pretty much all you need to know about 'Death Proof'. Sure, there's no mention of the purposely tacky acting, editing and camerawork; the deranged sleaze-bucket villain; or the inane motherf****r-laden conversations that take up 90 percent of the running time (this is a Quentin Tarantino movie, after all). But what the film finally does come down to is mangled metal, shattered glass, and three pissed-off women who really want to kick some sleaze-bucket ass.

That ass belongs to one Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a creepy letch who spends his time cruising the streets of nowhere towns in search of some girl action. But he doesn’t have much luck. It could be his Elvis-in-Las-Vegas quiff, the scarred face and demented grin combo, or those pickup lines: stories of his heyday that are met with blank stares from the women less than half his age.

He just seems like a creep. And his ride doesn’t help matters, either — the midnight blue muscle car with a giant white skull splattered across the bonnet simply screams "small penis". But looks can be deceiving — while the Dodge Charger isn’t a babe magnet, it's certainly a lethal weapon, "death proofed" so that the driver can walk away from pretty much any collision. So Mike uses it for what any bored homicidal maniac would: chasing and killing women.

There's not much of that chasing and killing, though. Just plenty of talking. Tarantino focuses on the two groups of young women targeted by the nutso stuntman — the first a local celebrity DJ and three friends hanging out in a dive; the second a group working on a low budget movie seeking thrills in a vintage Dodge Challenger.

With their dialogue written by a '70s-obsessed guy in his 40s, they talk (and talk) about what a '70s-obsessed guy in his 40s thinks young women talk about: guys, scoring drugs, and obscure '70s trivia. The writer-director teasingly splashes around a bit of blood in the middle, but ultimately it's all foreplay for the climactic 10-minute car chase involving crazy Kurt and those three pissed-off women — two of whom turn out to be stunt players.

It's a finale almost worth the wait, a thrilling sequence that has the usually verbose director shut up for once and let his cameras do the talking. Movie buff Tarantino clearly has a typically detailed knowledge of classic, CGI-free motoring stunts, no doubt gained from watching the very exploitation films he's playing tribute to in 'Death Proof'. But unlike Robert Rodriguez' 'Planet Terror', his homage is a little too subtle, too adoring, too much the work of a fanboy. Sure, he's used a few genre characteristics like the overlapping edits; crackly, streaky film; tacky tomato sauce blood; and some hopelessly hammy acting from Russell who plays his trademark Snake Pliskin character ('Escape From New York') as an ageing pornstar.

But what we really want is more car, less conversation.