The play's the thing: "Pulp Fiction" at 30

MIA WALLACE: Who told you?

VINCENT VEGA: They.

MIA WALLACE: They talk a lot, don't they?

VINCENT VEGA: They certainly do. They certainly do.

Somewhat improbably, Pulp Fiction has turned 30, which seems far too old for a work that served as a cornerstone of so many people's youth. This was, of course, the sophomore film that confirmed Quentin Tarantino, after 1992's eye- and ear-catching Reservoir Dogs, as the great white hope of the American popular cinema; its vast commercial success - raking in $213m on a $9m budget - kept Harvey Weinstein in place as head of Miramax, allowing both him and his prodigal talent to dominate the motion picture landscape for most of the next three decades. We watch it, then, in a very different context to that of 1994, yet some elements of the film haven't changed. From the off, you can sense why actors were so buzzed to sign up for the project: this was a feast of moving parts, arming its players with enduring monologues and punchy lines, audition pieces for starrier Tarantino films to come. Windy and verbose, revelling in its own language, this stuff must have read like Shakespeare for actors who'd never been invited to the RSC. There are fun games for the audience, too, whether puzzling out how exactly these achronological scenes connect together, ranking those performers in a Buzzfeed list from MVPs (Samuel L. Jackson, Harvey Keitel, Bruce Willis) to not-very-good Ps (Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, Tarantino himself), or deciding which actor would make the best (i.e. most surprising, because least well remembered) answer on an edition of Pointless. The contenders come thick and fast: Frank Whaley, Eric Stoltz, Maria de Medeiros, Steve Buscemi (the diner scene's Buddy Holly), Kathy Griffin (playing herself, apparently). The top Pointless answer may still be Bronagh Gallagher from The Commitments, only briefly glimpsed, but some indication of how everyone was being sucked into Tarantino's orbit circa 1994.

The element of play is central to Pulp Fiction. Miramax had been bought up by Disney the year before, and Tarantino promptly gifted Weinstein a film that effectively served as a theme park for the over-18s, complete with its own themed restaurant (Jack Rabbit Slim's), whose extravagant, budget-blowing design was its own display of the confidence studio chief had in favoured film son. Here were scenes as rollercoaster rides, looping around on one another and gradually constructing an idea of something bigger, a Tarantinoland or Tarantinoworld. This was the writer-director's gift, for leftfield accelerations of word and deed; for scenarios that demanded the viewer strap in and hold on tight. Two jobbing hitmen (Jackson and the re-emergent John Travolta, finding himself at the centre of things for the first time in a decade-and-a-half) start talking about burgers and wind up covered in blood. Two loved-up bank robbers (Roth and Amanda Plummer) decide to rob the diner they're idly chatting in. A gold watch leads to forced sodomy and murder in the backroom of an L.A. pawn shop. By way of variation, one of the hitmen takes a gangster's moll (Uma Thurman) out for milkshakes and ends up in a dance-off - though even this diversion leads, eventually, to bloodshed. It's all heading in one direction, which is why nothing seems overly complicated or mystifying; Pulp was really no more than an expansion of the tight, self-contained Dogs, another movie that started with ne'er-do-wells yakking in a diner, but there the theatre of cruelty had been limited to five (or so) guys in an austere warehouse. What was new (and thrilling) at the time was the especially roundabout way Tarantino outlined and filled the extra space, the chatting and chewing that stalled the inevitable confrontation. With the knowledge of Tarantino's subsequent gabfests, this now seems a mixed blessing. Jackson and Travolta's back-and-forths still crackle appreciably - you like hanging out with them - but the draggy Willis/de Medeiros scenes might well have been cut by a director working for a less forgiving employer.

The whole now stands as a mouthily American monument to consumption, be that the stories Tarantino had gobbled up in his youth or the junk (cereal, cocaine, milkshakes, Pop Tarts) his characters pump into themselves. (Even the joke Thurman tells Travolta centres on ketchup; these scripts must have arrived full of crumbs, and smeared with who-knows-what substances.) Yet what finally leaves Pulp Fiction no more than Disneyland for movie nerds, a second Planet Hollywood, is that it at no point brushes against the painful life experience of the previous year's Short Cuts, by which Robert Altman and Raymond Carver underlined their claims to being artists rather than merely fanboys. Not a single one of these bullets is felt; the action takes place not in actual L.A., but a vast, sterile, self-sealed safe space, cushioned by ironic quotation marks. Tarantino would push beyond chicanery and heartlessness for his next trick, 1997's Jackie Brown, but after its commercial failure, he put it down as a failed experiment and shut himself back in his teenage bedroom for the Kill Bill diptych. So Anthony Lane's concerns that this creative was essentially trading in trivia, that we risked elevating to prominence no more than a garrulous hamburger fetishist, still apply. (If not burgers, then other plates of meat: clock the way Thurman is introduced, and how quickly the conversation turns to foot massage.) In the matter of Pulp v. Gump, first litigated at Oscars 1995, I would have voted Quiz Show, or Shawshank if I were feeling sentimental. There is still enjoyment to be found amid this compendium: you'll get to see Jackson quote Ezekiel, where that "John Travolta entering a room" GIF and those bizarre Harvey Keitel life insurance ads came from, and there are points where Tarantino's narrative facility still wrongfoots us, pleasurably. Yet I think we might now healthily approach this canonical text with an ambivalence that extends beyond its maker's altogether casual licensing of the N-word: though artfully arranged, these profane breezeblocks might equally have been assembled in such a way that Pulp Fiction didn't result in Tarantino becoming an insufferable windbag, and in Weinstein being further empowered to do what he did. Playtime's over, boys.

Pulp Fiction returns to cinemas nationwide tomorrow.