The first half of From Dusk Till Dawn is a pretty dull, routine kidnapping plot. Two criminals are booking it to the Mexican border. There are some failed nods to characterization, but it is transparently mechanical. We've seen too many movies like this before: an assortment of characters, each with one, maybe two defining characteristics, are thrown forcefully together. Then monsters (vampires, in this case) wipe them out. The nods to characterization are a distraction, essentially. Arguably, the movie would have been marginally better without any attempt at characterization at all, because at least then there wouldn't be the false pretense. The way to make a movie like this good is to make the characters matter. In From Dusk Till Dawn, they don't. The story is absent anyway.