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KILL
BILL: VOLUME ONE Rating:   (out of 5 stars)Director: Quentin Tarantino Producers: Lawrence Bender Writer: Quentin Tarantino Director of Photography: Robert Richardson Cast: Uma Thurman, Darryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Sonny Chiba, Michael Madsen, David Carradine Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew |
 Click on the photo to buy merchandise from Kill Bill: Volume One. |
Just in case you weren't of the opinion that Quentin Tarantino is an important filmmaker, a title card during the opening credits of Kill Bill: Volume One dutifully informs you that this is the director's 4th film. Apparently, despite the fact that his career is only four movies old (actually isn't this his 4 ¼ film? Does his segment of Four Rooms not count?), Tarantino has made such a lasting contribution to the art of cinema that it's time his films start being catalogued in the credits of his own work. But Kill Bill's early reminder eventually serves as an inadvertent red flag -- a career that is barely growing out of its infancy is already borrowing from itself in the most obvious of ways.
I might think Kill Bill: Volume One is a good film if 1.) I wasn't intimately familiar with Tarantino's body of work or 2.) The movie was released as one whole, instead of in two separate volumes. (Volume Two is due out in February 2004.) With that said, Kill Bill: Volume One may be a movie that I appreciate much more when I view it after seeing its second half. Then again, it may turn out to be even more disappointing. Volume One doesn't feel like a complete film -- it seems much more like an episode of a television series to be continued next week, complete with a gimmicky narrative hook at its conclusion.
Laid out in chapters, Kill Bill is a simple tale of revenge told in a manner that favors storytelling complexity. Its nonlinear construction features flashback segments and a narrative that plays with time sequencing (intertitles aid the viewer in keeping on top of things). Uma Thurman stars as The Bride, a former member of a group known as The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, for whom she was dubbed The Black Mamba. Apparently having had an acrimonious split with the group, The Bride is targeted by the Squad and their ruthless leader, Bill (a mainly unseen David Carradine), who brings the assassins to El Paso, Texas to run roughshod over The Bride's wedding. Nine people are killed at the ceremony, and The Bride, who is pregnant, is shot in the head and left for dead. Incredibly, she survives the attack and spends the next four years lying in a coma in an El Paso hospital.
When the Bride recovers, she embarks on a savage mission to dole out her own personal form of justice to the perpetrators of the vicious crime, who have all since went their separate ways. This leads her to Japan, where she must do battle with O-Ren Ishi a.k.a. Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu), the head of a Yakuza unit known as The Crazy 88s, and also to suburban Pasadena, CA to bring down Vernita Green a.ka. Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox), who has settled down in the role of housewife/mother. We are also aware that Elle Driver aka California Mountain Snake (Darryl Hannah) and Budd aka Sidewinder (Michael Madsen) are part of the Squad, but The Bride won't deal with them until Volume Two.
Kill Bill: Volume One is basically a series of set pieces strung together, getting its kicks by delivering gruesome violence that's intense in execution (no pun intended) but tastelessly casual in effect. You are treated to beheadings, severed limbs and even a scalping -- the fake blood budget must've been considerable. Tarantino is paying homage, as he has stated, to the '70s martial arts "grindhouse" flicks he grew up on in the South Bay of Los Angeles, and while I won't claim to be an expert in the genre, a film he endlessly references is Jimmy Wang Yu's The Master of the Flying Guillotine, a movie that I consider a classic. In trying to replicate this brand of fun, sensationalistic cinema, Kill Bill becomes something of a contradiction -- it actually takes itself way too seriously. Tarantino tries so hard to deliver the faux '70s kitsch and cool, that Kill Bill largely plays as annoyingly self-aware. The trademark Tarantino pop culture-referencing, hipster-speak dialogue is kept to a minimum, but seems to stick out awkwardly whenever it appears. ("Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids." I regret to inform you that I'm not kidding about this one.)
Let me get back to what I mentioned in the opening paragraph about the director stealing from his early work. Take, for instance, the character Buck (Michael Bowen), a redneck hospital orderly who pimps out The Bride's comatose body to assorted deviants, and compare him to Zed (Peter Greene) from Pulp Fiction. A little too close for comfort -- right down to the flashy key chain. Listen to the manner in which Thurman delivers portions of her dialogue, and it's not hard to also hear John Travolta's voice in Pulp Fiction. After Lucy Liu beheads a man who questions her racial makeup at a meeting of her Yakuza group, she goes on a bombastic rant that sounds exactly like Amanda Plummer yelling to the diners at the coffee shop in the beginning of Pulp Fiction that she'll "execute every last motherfucking one of you." The self-plagiarizing really goes a bit far here. Now if David Carradine pulls out a wallet bearing the initials BM in Volume Two…
The fight scenes are well-choreographed, shot and edited, but most go on far too long. The Showdown at House of Blue Leaves chapter provides the biggest thrills (and features excellent bits of The RZA's very good, although a tad overused, score), including the best sequence, a battle between The Bride and O-Ren's young female bodyguard, Go Go (Chiaki Kuriyama), which liberally quotes from the aforementioned Master of the Flying Guillotine. Still, even with the excitement, other parts of this long scene, like when The Bride goes to war against the whole horde of Crazy 88s at once, left me bored silly.
I really wish I didn't have to write about
this film until I could see Volume Two of Kill Bill, because
I'd like to have more of an opinion, one way or the other, about
this ambitious work. Proponents will think it's a masterpiece
of mayhem; detractors will find it gratuitously/mindlessly violent
and may justifiably wonder if Tarantino has anything left to offer
except more trails of dead bodies. As for me, at the midway point,
I'm sitting squarely on the fence.
(A Miramax Films release. Opens in wide release on October
10, 2003.)
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