| MAYOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!! REVIEW OF THE 222 PAGES OF PURE EXPLOITATION. Never in my entire scriptreading career have I ever met a screenplay with so much difficult words in it. That was my very first impression after reading QUENTIN TARANTINO�S KILL BILL I read this in one 3 hour sitting and at 4 AM... I was disappointed. Without any doubt, the enormous hype it was getting at TARANTINO.INFO had something to do with it. But all by all, this feels like Tarantino�s Panic Room, after delivering such an extraordinary film like Pulp Fiction. But you certainly can�t blame him for trying. Once again he takes a different (and again unseen for the majority) narrative approach. The tale of a female assassin (Uma Thurman), The Bride, is told in chapters. Each one unfolds the story of the how and why she wants to, as the title suggests, Kill Bill. Bill (David Carradine) is the number one assassin in the world and also the lover of The Bride. But in the first pages, during the Prologue, he puts a bullet in her head. And she gets in a coma for 5 years, giving her unborn child little chance of life. And this is how the journey begins... I love films or stories about struggle. Like Far And Away and Memoirs of a Geisha. They are about ordinary people in extraordinary situations trying to have a normal life. The situation might be caused by a war, or it might be caused by fate. In Kill Bill The Bride must overcome both. As she has to kill 33 people and overcome many pains and luckless situations to reach her goal. In the first chapter, titled �2�, we learn that not only is the protagonist a skilled assassin, she has also respect for her opponent and the code of the DiVAS -- a squad of the worlds most deadliest, all equipped with samurai swords, founded by Bill. Almost all of them, moments before their death seek forgiveness at The Bride. For they sincerely are, but they have helped to put The Bride into a state of coma because they are what they were. Assassins. The seeking of and receiving of redemption for the killers is what makes The Bride and the antagonists refreshing. It also (barely) saves the characters from being comic book villians. This film has humor. Humor not in the sense of people sitting around a table and giving humorous anecdotes, but humor in the sense of coolness. As this film is all about being tough and being fearless. I laughed at the Voice-Over given by The Bride about her dead fiancee, I laughed at the introduction of Hattori Hanzo, I laughed at the craziness of Yuki. I laughed at those moments because I�ve seen this all in different films, but it comes unexpected. And therefor it erases the remark of being cliche. But this tale of The Bride�s Roaring Rampage of Revenge doesn�t seem realistic enough to me. It�s set in a world where people heads get chopped off if a person says something what he shouldn�t, or the entire Shoalin Temple gets wiped out because of a monk who forgot to nod back to Pai Mei. But during those acts there were also pure humane moments. Like when she�s in the back of the a truck, after she escapes the hospital, trying to move her toe. Or when she�s buried alive. She has done things what 99 percent of us couldn�t, but she reads humane, and therefor I�d accepted it. But I still couldn�t feel with her. Because really none of the characters made me care. For a moment I liked Budd, the brother of Bill, before he tries to eliminate our heroine in an extreme cruel way. But if I look back at Pulp Fiction I can�t really say I felt with the Bruce Willis character or any other of them. I just sat back and enjoyed their struggle. And yet not a single review of the film has made it a handicap to the critical rave it got. The actors will no doubt be able to bring these vivid characters to life, especially Uma, as you can read it off the page till it drips that is was specially written for her. |
| Kill Bill Review |
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