The cinematic release of Killing Zoe was originally timed to capitalise on Quentin Tarantino mania, which followed the release of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction in the early Nineties. Hence the rather cynical marketing campaign, which saw the name Tarantino in large letters, overshadowing everything else on the pack shot.

Tarantino is, in fact, the executive producer. Zoe's writer/director is his friend and long time collaborator, Roger Avary, which is evident in his style of filmmaking. I suspect this rather timely DVD release is intended to coincide with the success of Kill Bill. The look of its menu, for example, with blocks of yellow and black, is strikingly similar to Bill's promotional artwork. However, I attempted to put cynicism to one side and watch the film with an open mind and was rewarded with an entertaining, if somewhat one dimensional, heist flick.

It opens with the main character, Zed (Eric Stoltz), arriving in Paris, with the camera weaving through chaotic traffic, as his taxi takes him to his hotel. These opening scenes create a sense of moving rapidly and unavoidably towards some defining moment.

Zed is a skilled American safe-cracker, who has come to take part in a bank robbery that is being planned by an old friend. The taxi driver, who takes him into the heart of Paris, arranges a prostitute for the jaded Zed, offering to show him the real city, which is something of a theme running throughout the film.

Zed and the prostitute Zoe (Julie Delpy) hit it off, but his friend, played with wonderfull psychotic glee by Jean-Hugues Anglade, soon arrives to show him his version of the real Paris, which turns out to be an orgy of drugs and traditional French music, in seedy underground nightclubs.

Next morning they don carnival masks and set off to rob the bank, but a hungover Zed faces a crisis of loyalty, when the plan begins to unravel, because Zoe's day job turns out to be a teller at the same bank.

While entertaining enough, there is little to make this stand out in the overcrowded genre of gone-wrong-heist flicks. Some interesting ideas are never properly developed and the post-Dogs dialogue and Peckinpah Meets Manga violence seems a little over-familiar.