Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino;
Running time: 95 minutes' This film is rated R, 2003
Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen, Michael Parks, Sonny Chiba and Chiaki Kuriyama.
With its relentless bloodshed and scrambled, inconclusive narrative, Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited fourth feature, ''Kill Bill: Vol. 1,'' is certain to provoke both awe and revulsion. The film's detractors and its fans are likely to agree, however, that the movie, a densely referential pastiche of B-movie attitudes and situations, is above all an exercise in style.
In parts of ''Pulp Fiction'' (1994) and in his last picture, ''Jackie Brown'' (1997), Mr. Tarantino seemed to be using the action-exploitation formulas of which he is so enamored as stepping stones toward an exploration of plausible characters and authentic emotions. Now, it seems, his interests have swung in the opposite direction, and he has immersed himself, his characters and his audience in a highly artificial world, a looking-glass universe that reflects nothing beyond his own cinematic obsessions.
How much you like ''Kill Bill,'' a two-part revenge epic, the first volume of which opens nationwide today, will probably depend on the extent to which you share those obsessions, on how much of a taste you have for the synthetic fusion cuisine that the director has cooked up. There are some strong and diverse flavors, as well as vivid colors in the mix, all of them deftly reflected in the hip-hop artist RZA's clever, eclectic score. Mr. Tarantino samples the lurid hues of spaghetti westerns, the deep-fried funk of 70's blaxploitation, and above all the graceful and kinetic mayhem of Asian action movies, from Hong Kong-style martial arts to samurai swordplay to hard-boiled gangster anime.
I should probably confess here that Mr. Tarantino's knowledge of these genres, to say nothing of his appetite for them, far surpasses my own (and I'd guess, just about everybody else's as well). But while being so relentlessly exposed to a filmmaker's idiosyncratic turn-ons can be tedious and off-putting, the undeniable passion that drives ''Kill Bill'' is fascinating, even, strange to say it, endearing. Mr. Tarantino is an irrepressible showoff, recklessly flaunting his formal skills as a choreographer of high-concept violence, but he is also an unabashed cinephile, and the sincerity of his enthusiasm gives this messy, uneven spectacle an odd, feverish integrity.
Old movies are not the sole focus of his obsession. The most vivid emotional connection in ''Kill Bill'' does not take place between any of the characters, but between the director and his star, Uma Thurman. Mr. Tarantino has referred to Ms. Thurman as ''my actress,'' and as Marlene Dietrich to his Josef von Sternberg. Accordingly, much of the perverse energy of ''Kill Bill'' arises from his near-maniacal fascination with her. She is at once his idol, his alter-ego, his dream lover and his muse, the way Anna Karina was for Jean-Luc Godard in the early 1960's.
Mr. Tarantino shoots the elliptical curves of Ms. Thurman's face in extreme close-up, his wide shots emphasize her tall, willowy frame, and at one point the camera lingers on her long, strangely shaped toes for what seems like an entire reel. A title at the end informs us that the movie is ''based on The Bride, a character created by Q and U'' -- as in Quentin and Uma. In the movie, the two of them, one in front of the camera and one behind it, seem as inseparable as those two codependant letters.
It must be said that this infatuation takes some disturbing forms. The opening shot, in black-and-white, lingers on Ms. Thurman's bloody, beaten face. Her character, known by various aliases (her real name, for reasons that may become clear in Volume 2, is bleeped out whenever it is uttered), is attacked on her wedding day and left for dead by a team of assassins called the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS). They have been hired by Bill (David Carradine, whose face is never shown), who was once the Bride's lover and whose child she may be carrying. After four years in a coma, she wakes up and sets out to take revenge on her assailants, writing a ''to kill'' list with their names on it.
Bill's name is last, and since this is only the first episode, the title's imperative, which sounds like Dr. Seuss gone haywire, remains unfulfilled. Not that there is any shortage of killing. As is his habit, Mr. Tarantino presents the action out of sequence, so that the first person (Copperhead, played by Vivica A. Fox) to be dispatched is the second one on the list. This may be a tongue-in-cheek nod to a venerable Hollywood convention: the black character dies first. Copperhead lives in a tidy suburban house, which she and the Bride proceed to demolish in a frenzy of hand-to-hand combat interrupted by the arrival of a school bus carrying Copperhead's young daughter.
Later -- that is, earlier -- our heroine will force an elaborate showdown with Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu), who has ascended from assassin-for-hire to Tokyo gangland leader. Ms. Liu once again demonstrates her agility; she also shows off her linguistic ability and her brains (literally). Michael Madsen and Daryl Hannah, the remaining DiVAS members, will be dealt with in Volume 2.
It will inevitably be said, in Mr. Tarantino's defense, that his violence is fundamentally cartoonish. (The actual cartoon inserted in the middle of the picture, to provide background on one of the Bride's would-be assassins, may be bloodier than anything else in it, which is saying a lot.) But he undermines this argument with sequences that cross the line between jolting and sickening. While the Bride is in the hospital, a cretinous orderly named Buck rents out her unconscious body for sex; when she wakes up, she kills Buck's latest customer by chewing off part of his face, and then takes care of Buck by slamming his head in a metal door.
Compared with this, the long, intricate climax, during which the Bride takes on 88 yakuza fighters and litters a Tokyo nightclub with their severed limbs and writhing trunks, feels as insouciant and elegant as a show-stopping musical number. Which, in essence, it is, staged with the assistance of the martial-arts maestro Yuen Wo-Ping.
The sordid creepiness that occasionally seeps into ''Kill Bill'' makes you wonder what Mr. Tarantino is trying to do, and whether he is entirely in control of his own imagination. Other parts of the movie are notable for their dullness, especially an interminable chapter during which the Bride purchases a sword from a reluctant craftsman played by the Japanese action legend Sonny Chiba. The point, aside from allowing an excursion into mystical Shaolin mumbo jumbo and displaying Ms. Thurman in a cute American tourist jeans-and-T-shirt ensemble, seems to be to revel in the sheer presence of Mr. Chiba. Check it out, Mr. Tarantino seems to be saying, Sonny Chiba's in my movie. How cool is that?
Way too cool? Not cool enough? As I said, it depends. The movie-geek in-jokes are sometimes amusing and sometimes annoying. The English dialogue is purposely stilted, often sounding like badly translated subtitles (''I have no wish to kill you before the eyes of your daughter,'' the Bride says to Copperhead, before doing just that). When the characters speak Japanese, the English subtitles show a similar awkwardness (''Whom in Okinawa made you this steel?'').
The hurtling incoherence of the story may also be, at least partly, a tribute to its sources, in which sense was more often than not trumped by sensation. Will the loose ends and cliffhangers that proliferate in Volume 1 be satisfactorily resolved in Volume 2? Will anyone outside the hard core of Mr. Tarantino's fans really care? Whom knows.
The worst thing about the first Quentin Tarantino picture in five years is that after 93 minutes of some of the most luscious violence and spellbinding storytelling you're likely to see this year, ''Kill Bill'' ends.
Anyone breathless to learn how the Bride (Uma Thurman) does, indeed, kill Bill, her wicked groom, has to wait until February. So, dear Miramax and Quentin Tarantino: hiss. ''Kill Bill,'' which opens nationwide today, is actually ''Kill Bill Vol. 1'' and Tarantino, who wrote and directed this pulse-quickening martial-arts magnum opus, decided somewhere during the production to split the film comic-book-style into a two-part serial -- thus leaving 'em wanting more.
''Vol. 1'' is broken into five chapters and told out of sequence. The effect is less surprising than it was in ''Pulp Fiction,'' where Tarantino messed with temporality to create a karmic cosmos colored by sin and redemption. ''Kill Bill'' uses time as an instrument to ratchet up the suspense.
The story is simple and sad enough. A woman whom Tarantino calls the Bride is shot by her husband (David Carradine, heard but never fully seen) and bludgeoned by his four assassins -- Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, and Michael Madsen. Quite pregnant and on her wedding day, too! Bill puts a bullet in her head, leaving her as carrion, but somehow she wakes up hospitalized from a coma four years later, her baby dead, a metal plate in her skull, and night after night of a nurse letting strangers molest her in bed.
This movie is a country song expanded into a bellicose adventure in retribution -- Bobbie Gentry righteously dropped into ''Enter the Dragon.'' Thurman, for her part, is game to be dragged through the bowels of hell. Her gritty, physical performance is balanced with a comedienne's wit. The only conventional thing about her character is Tarantino's dopey decision to keep track of her kills via a to-do list -- as if she'd forgotten what the movie is called. It was silly 35 years ago when wronged and murderous Jeanne Moreau was crossing names off her list in Francois Truffaut's ''The Bride Wore Black,'' a lark whose revenge plot seems polite by Tarantino's standards. Two electric brawls bookend the film. ''Kill Bill'' more or less opens with the first, a knock-down, drag-out waltz between the Bride and the wonderfully named Vernita Green (Fox), one-fourth of Bill's Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS). Choreographed with precise brutality by Yuen Wo-Ping and edited with breakneck glee by Sally Menke, it's a street fight set in Vernita's suburban Los Angeles living room: coffee tables and good china demolished; family portraits smashed out of their frames.In a classic Tarantino moment, Vernita and the Bride viciously eye each other on opposite sides of a window, through which we see a school bus pull up and a little girl get out, walk up to the door, and enter the house. It's Vernita's daughter, and the ladies, coated in blood, sweat, and broken glass, stash their cutlery behind their backs and pretend for the kid's sake to be old girlfriends.It's hard to think of another sequence that combines irony, suspense, dread, comedy, surrealism, violence, and swollen faces with as much stupefying zest as the one Tarantino has concocted. Hong Kong action pictures are renowned for these sorts of absurdist scenarios, but ''Kill Bill'' pushes the absurd to the brink of horror by having it operate according to recognizable moral boundaries: no stabbing in front of the kids. Yet, in spite of those guidelines, children play a consciously disturbing role in the picture, subjected to adult violence, always without warning.The person most defined by a destructive childhood legacy is O-Ren Ishii, the DiVAS member the Bride has flown to Japan to kill. Her back story is told partly as a deadly-serious interlude of subtitled Japanese animation that explains how a little girl became the unlikely queen of the Tokyo underworld: by avenging her father's murder. The passage communicates the grisly soul of great anime and Japanese comic books. It's not a superfluous touch, either. It's the most graphic sequence in the film, cleverly taking what, as live action, would be essentially unfilmable (killer 11-year-olds and whatnot) and still finding ways to make the conflict both harder to watch and more resoundingly human than the flesh-and-bone material that surrounds it.The sword fight showdown between the adult O-Ren, played by a fantastic Liu, and the Bride occupies the last third of ''Kill Bill.'' And to divulge much about it would just be rude. Just know that the Bride first has to extinguish O-Ren's sizable retinue and that the ever-imaginative cinematographer Robert Richardson has outdone himself here. The sequence is a sort of ballet that unfolds in four distinct movements -- one of which is a disco bolero with the fighters silhouetted against panels of indigo light. It might be the most entertainingly ludicrous fight sequence ever filmed. Better than nearly any American director, Tarantino deploys the history of screen violence -- from slapstick foolery to utter doom -- to enthrall. In the film's opening line, Bill asks his blood-spattered bride, ''Do you find me sadistic?'' and Tarantino must be wondering if we think the same thing about him. The answer is yes. But he's also the movies' sadist laureate. His brand of violence has the uncanny ability to seduce without desensitizing you to pain. (Enough can't be made of how much of Thurman's performance is spent wincing and groaning.)
With these first 90 minutes of ''Kill Bill,'' Tarantino reinvents the American action flick, using his usual arsenal of allusions and verve to make pop art of cult schlock. The movie lifts Japanese-Hong Kong grind-house violence to a rare operatic territory, without putting the martial-arts genre and the samurai flick out of business. He's fused them into a single cinematic species. It has nothing mind-blowing to say about the human condition -- although his movies suggest that it's grim. For now, he's content to continue pouring his heart and soul into trash, making, with ''Kill Bill,'' the year's most important unimportant movie.
The resulting mongrel isn't just a blood bath, it's blood bathhouse, with sake-soaked references to carnage kings as diverse as Sonny Chiba, Sergio Leone, and Kinji Fukasaku. ''Kill Bill'' has more samples than 800 Costcos -- lord knows how many aisles you'd have to walk down to taste them all. You'll have plenty of time to try, though. February seems a light year away. Apparently, the Bride's revenge can wait.
"Kill Bill, Volume 1" shows Quentin Tarantino so effortlessly and brilliantly in command of his technique that he reminds me of a virtuoso violinist racing through "Flight of the Bumble Bee" -- or maybe an accordion prodigy setting a speed record for "Lady of Spain." I mean that as a sincere compliment. The movie is not about anything at all except the skill and humor of its making. It's kind of brilliant.
His story is a distillation of the universe of martial arts movies, elevated to a trancelike mastery of the material. Tarantino is in the Zone. His story engine is revenge. In the opening scene, Bill kills all of the other members of a bridal party, and leaves The Bride (Uma Thurman) for dead. She survives for years in a coma and is awakened by a mosquito's buzz. Is QT thinking of Emily Dickinson, who heard a fly buzz when she died? I am reminded of Manny Farber's definition of the auteur theory: "A bunch of guys standing around trying to catch someone shoving art up into the crevices of dreck." The Bride is no Emily Dickinson. She reverses the paralysis in her legs by "focusing." Then she vows vengeance on the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, and as "Volume 1" concludes, she is about half-finished. She has wiped out Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), and in "Volume 2" will presumably kill Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), Budd (Michael Madsen) and of course Bill (David Carradine). If you think I have given away plot details, you think there can be doubt about whether the heroine survives the first half of a two-part action movie, and should seek help.
The movie is all storytelling and no story. The motivations have no psychological depth or resonance, but are simply plot markers. The characters consist of their characteristics. Lurking beneath everything, as it did with "Pulp Fiction," is the suggestion of a parallel universe in which all of this makes sense in the same way that a superhero's origin story makes sense. There is a sequence here (well, it's more like a third of the movie) where The Bride single-handedly wipes out O-Ren and her entire team, including the Crazy 88 Fighters, and we are reminded of Neo fighting the clones of Agent Smith in "The Matrix Reloaded," except the Crazy 88 Fighters are individual human beings, I think. Do they get their name from the Crazy 88 blackjack games on the Web, or from Episode 88 of the action anime "Tokyo Crazy Paradise," or should I seek help? The Bride defeats the 88 superb fighters (plus various bodyguards and specialists) despite her weakened state and recently paralyzed legs because she is a better fighter than all of the others put together. Is that because of the level of her skill, the power of her focus, or the depth of her need for vengeance? Skill, focus and need have nothing to do with it: She wins because she kills everybody without getting killed herself. You can sense Tarantino grinning a little as each fresh victim, filled with foolish bravado, steps forward to be slaughtered. Someone has to win in a fight to the finish, and as far as the martial arts genre is concerned, it might as well be the heroine. (All of the major characters except Bill are women, the men having been emasculated right out of the picture.) "Kill Bill, Volume 1" is not the kind of movie that inspires discussion of the acting, but what Thurman, Fox and Liu accomplish here is arguably more difficult than playing the nuanced heroine of a Sundance thumb-sucker. There must be presence, physical grace, strength, personality and the ability to look serious while doing ridiculous things. The tone is set in an opening scene, where The Bride lies near death and a hand rubs at the blood on her cheek, which will not come off because it is clearly congealed makeup. This scene further benefits from being shot in black and white; for QT, all shots in a sense are references to other shots -- not particular shots from other movies, but archetypal shots in our collective moviegoing memories.
There's B&W in the movie, and slo-mo, and a name that's bleeped entirely for effect, and even an extended sequence in anime. The animated sequence, which gets us to Tokyo and supplies the backstory of O-Ren, is sneaky in the way it allows Tarantino to deal with material that might, in live action, seem too real for his stylized universe. It deals with a Mafia kingpin's pedophilia. The scene works in animated long shot; in live action closeup, it would get the movie an NC-17.
Before she arrives in Tokyo, The Bride stops off to obtain a sword from Hattori Hanzo ("special guest star" Sonny Chiba). He has been retired for years, and is done with killing. But she persuades him, and he manufactures a sword that does not inspire his modesty: "This my finest sword. If in your journey you should encounter God, God will be cut." Later the sword must face the skill of Go Go Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama), O-Ren's teenage bodyguard and perhaps a major in medieval studies, since her weapon of choice is the mace and chain. This is in the comic book tradition by which characters are defined by their weapons.
To see O-Ren's God-slicer and Go-Go's mace clashing in a field of dead and dying men is to understand how women have taken over for men in action movies. Strange, since women are not nearly as good at killing as men are. Maybe they're cast because the liberal media wants to see them succeed. The movie's women warriors reminds me of Ruby Rich's defense of Russ Meyer as a feminist filmmaker (his women initiate all the sex and do all the killing).
There is a sequence in which O-Ren Ishii takes command of the Japanese Mafia and beheads a guy for criticizing her as half-Chinese, female and American. O-Ren talks Japanese through a translator but when the guy's head rolls on the table everyone seems to understand her. Soon comes the deadly battle with The Bride, on a two-level set representing a Japanese restaurant. Tarantino has the wit to pace this battle with exterior shots of snowfall in an exquisite formal garden. Why must the garden be in the movie? Because gardens with snow are iconic Japanese images, and Tarantino is acting as the instrument of his received influences.
By the same token, Thurman wears a costume identical to one Bruce Lee wore in his last film. Is this intended as coincidence, homage, impersonation? Not at all. It can be explained by quantum physics: The suit can be in two movies at the same time. And when the Hannah character whistles the theme from "Twisted Nerve" (1968), it's not meant to suggest she is a Hayley Mills fan but that leakage can occur between parallel universes in the movies. Will "Volume 2" reveal that Bud used to be known as Mr. Blonde?
In an interview following the release of Reservoir Dogs in 1992, Tim Roth ventured that "I honestly think you could take the same script but reshoot it with women and it would work. It would be the most controversial film ever. You could call it Reservoir Bitches." It took more than a decade, but with Kill Bill Volume 1 , Quentin Tarantino finally made his Reservoir Bitches. And while it's not the most controversial film ever (nor even of the past twelve months), that was clearly the director's aspiration. Originally conceived as a single film but split into two "volumes" due to its length (Volume 2 opens in theaters on Friday), Kill Bill is, by most accounts, the most violent film ever released by a major studio. If that weren't enough to ensure its notoriety, the vast majority of that violence is performed by officially hot actresses Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, and Vivica A. Fox.
Kill Bill, then, is less a movie than a dare, and like most dares its outcome is unfortunate. Ever since Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino has been trying to live down to his reputation as the enfant terrible of American cinema, and with Kill Bill he has finally succeeded. Yes, yes, yes: It is stylishly conceived and lavishly photographed; it has a clever, wicked soundtrack; it contains more movie references than a semester of film school. It is also pitifully thin, morally repulsive, and boring as hell. The plot feels as though it was written on a cocktail napkin at two-o'clock in the morning: A nameless and pregnant Bride (Thurman), is gunned down at her wedding--along with groom, reverend, and assorted bystanders--by members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, a civic organization of which she was once a member. Shot in the head and left for dead, she instead falls into a coma, from which she awakes, sans child, four years later. She promptly jots down a "Death List" featuring the names of the five Vipers responsible for the wedding massacre. The first two--Vernita Green (Fox) and O-Ren Ishii (Liu)--she crosses off in the course of Volume 1. The other three--Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, and David Carradine (he would be Bill)--will have to wait until Volume 2.
Tarantino obviously thinks that this is epic stuff, and it's true that with the right treatment it might have aspired to the mythic simplicity of say, Sergio Leone (spaghetti westerns being one of the many genres Tarantino nods to). But Tarantino doesn't have the patience to do epic. Kill Bill supplies neither emotional buildup nor emotional release. It's merely a series of provocations, obscenity presented as comedy. In the first 45 minutes of the film, viewers are treated to: the Bride killing Green with a knife in front of her four-year-old daughter; the Bride discovering that during her coma a hospital orderly rented her body out to necrophiliac rapists (she kills one such in the act by biting his face off, and then crushes the orderly's head in a door); and O-Ren's "origin" story, presented in anime cartoon form. As a child she, too, witnessed the gory murder of her parents, in this case by sword. But all is not lost: The Bride's narration informs us that "luckily" the murderer was a pedophile, enabling O-Ren at the age of eleven to get into his bed and slowly disembowel him. (The pedophilia-necrophilia motif comes up again later in a tossed-off scene in which O-Ren's bodyguard Gogo, a 17-year-old Japanese girl in a school uniform, asks an older man in a bar if he'd like to "screw" her; when he says yes, she guts him, his blood gushing over her plaid skirt and bare legs.) This is all, of course, terribly funny, right down to the details: the filthy, hair-covered jar of Vaseline the orderly offers the unconscious Bride's paramours; the young O-Ren hiding under a bed as her mother is stabbed to death on top of it, her blood seeping through the mattress to sprinkle O-Ren's face. (Lest anyone accuse Tarantino of indifference to the moral concerns implicit in such material, the filmmaker told the Chicago Tribune, "It would be really tough to do that scene in America using a real little girl. ... I don't know if I'd want to subject some poor little girl to these kind of images and these kind of acting things. Drip blood on a poor little girl's face in real life? Have some 11-year-old little girl straddling a guy as she stabs him to death? I don't know if I'd really want to be the person that does that. But in anime it's all good.")
The last hour of Kill Bill Volume 1 is tame by comparison, merely involving the Bride's acquisition and subsequent use of a samurai sword to dismember several dozen of O-Ren's flunkies, and ultimately O-Ren herself, at a Tokyo restaurant. The violence is ridiculous, in the literal sense of the word: When a baddie (there are no goodies) is decapitated, the neck-stump sprays blood like an infernal lawn sprinkler. These abattoir antics might amuse in limited doses (though John Cleese's Black Knight proved 30 years ago that the joke is not in the mutilation but in the obliviousness to it). Yet transgressing limits is Tarantino's whole point, and so we get stabbing after stabbing, severed limb after severed limb, arterial spray after arterial spray, until the walls are painted red and the floor piled high with body parts. And though the carnage is composed by famed martial-arts choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping, it lacks both the athletic poetry he brought to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the dizzying spatial geometry he presented in The Matrix. Rather, with the exception of a single sequence featuring a ball-and-chain, the fight in the restaurant (which runs to more than 20 minutes) feels like what it is: a long, mostly earthbound slog through bone and sinew. By the end, it's not funny, or beautiful, or even shocking. It's merely tiresome, an hour spent at the Safeway meat counter.
More surprising than the violence in Kill Bill, though, is the lack of anything else. One might expect that a movie so bloated that it requires a two-stage theatrical release could have found time for some of the director's trademark narrative inventiveness and pop banter. (Maybe those achievements await in Volume 2, but somehow I doubt it.) In Volume I, the plot is as linear as the to-do list that drives it. (Tarantino's Tarantinoesque decision to present the killing of Vernita Green out of sequence feels more like obligation than inspiration.) The dialogue is sub-leaden, apparently in self-defeating homage to poorly translated Japanese chop-socky. (For example: "It was one year after the massacre in El Paso, Texas, that Bill backed his Nippon progeny financially and philosophically in her Shakespearean in magnitude power struggle with the other Yakuza clans over who would rule vice in the city of Tokyo.") Even the film's signature line--O-Ren's taunt, "Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids"--sounds as though it was found on Schwarzenegger's cutting room floor. The situation isn't helped by the film's players, whose performances involve posing, fighting, and mouthing lines in which they obviously have no confidence, but nothing that could reasonably be described as acting. Unfortunately for the home viewer, all of these shortcomings are magnified on the small screen, where the visual spectacle cannot overwhelm the reality that this is, at its core, a dumb, ugly film. Will Volume 2 be any better? We'll see, but while it may exceed its Siamese sibling, it's hard to imagine it will redeem it.
In the end, what is most disappointing about Kill Bill Volume 1 is what it suggests about the development of its director. Throughout his still-brief career, Tarantino has seemed to grapple with the question of whether the bloodshed in his films represented a defining strength or an underlying weakness. Reservoir Dogs, while not as violent as its reputation, was nonetheless a brutal film, with a five-minute torture scene that still scandalizes. But one by one, his subsequent films--True Romance (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997)--traced a clear trajectory away from meaningless bloodshed. Jackie Brown's relatively lukewarm reception, however, sent Tarantino back to the drawing board. As a friend of Tarantino's told Peter Biskind for a Vanity Fair article last year, "He doesn't trust himself as an artist to be able to make something that is not popular." And so, according to Biskind, after a few years in the wilderness he set out to make the "anti-Jackie Brown." Hence, Kill Bill.
Ironically, of all Tarantino's previous work, the film Kill Bill most resembles is the one he disowned: Natural Born Killers. Tarantino's script for the film--originally conceived as part of the True Romance screenplay--was acquired, rewritten, and directed by Oliver Stone in 1994. Tarantino was unhappy enough with the result that he took his name off the screenplay, settling instead for a story credit. (He also famously "bitch-slapped" one of the producers, Don Murphy, at an L.A. restaurant; the resulting $5 million lawsuit was settled out of court.) But despite Tarantino's dislike for Natural Born Killers, it has much in common with Kill Bill: the shifts from saturated color to black and white to garish animation (shifts executed in both cases by the cinematographer Robert Richardson), the deliberately campy sets and models, the sexual grotesques, and most of all, the endless, mindless savagery. (In the faint-praise department, it's worth mentioning that Kill Bill does lack the mendacious sanctimony of Natural Born Killers.)
Tarantino may have best explained his motivation for Kill Bill in an interview he gave to The Village Voice last year. "It's a sad clich� that most every director ends their career with a whimper," he noted. "You know, it's like, 'The sex drive goes, great! Now I can devote myself to my art.' They didn't realize the dick drive is connected to the art drive." Kill Bill supplies little evidence of this anatomical correlation. Instead, it's confirmation that sometimes a dick flick is just a dick flick.
Quentin Tarantino fans have been waiting six long years for the release of the director's follow-up to Jackie Brown. So what do they get for their patience? An incomplete movie, artlessly cleft in the middle. Cinema interruptus. A film whose editing and inelegant structure have been severely compromised by the avarice of the Miramax head honchos, who believe they can wring more money from viewers by splitting Kill Bill into two pieces and double-charging everyone.
There's a key difference between Kill Bill and the likes of The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and Jean de Florette/Manon des Sources. All of those movies required more than one part to tell the entire story, but they were developed in such a way that each movie represents a chapter, sculpted within its constraints to follow a basic three-act structure. Each has a clearly defined, complete arc within the context of a larger, sprawling narrative. The average viewer left The Matrix Reloaded, The Fellowship of the Ring, and Jean de Florette satisfied (to varying degrees) and anticipating the next film. Not so with Kill Bill, which was constructed as a single motion picture before being sundered at the eleventh hour. The result is messy and frustrating - a movie that feels incomplete in every aspect. I felt like a con had been perpetrated upon me. As a whole, Kill Bill might be an entertaining product, but, after seeing Volume 1, I was insulted. What Miramax has done (in collusion with Tarantino, who seemingly supports their position) is a travesty. It's outrageous to expect people to buy two tickets, make two trips to theaters, and wait four months in between in order to see an entire movie.
Kill Bill is a basic revenge tale that Tarantino has dressed up by using gravity-defying martial arts and comically copious amounts of blood. The main character doesn't have a name (just as she doesn't have much of a personality - she's an icon), and is referred to solely as "The Bride" or by her code name, "Black Mamba." As played by Uma Thurman, she is grimness personified. That's understandable, though. On her wedding day, her husband-to-be was murdered, she was beaten up and shot in the head, and her unborn child was stolen from her womb. (We don't yet know why - presumably we'll find out in Volume 2.) The five responsible for this were Bill (David Carradine) and the four members of his "Deadly Viper Assassination Squad:" O-Ren Ishi a.k.a. Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu), Vernita Green a.k.a. Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox), Budd a.k.a. Side Winder (Michael Madsen), and Elle Driver a.k.a. California Mountain Snake (Daryl Hannah). Four years later, after awakening from a coma, The Bride has one thing on her mind: revenge. She starts out by going after Cottonmouth and Copperhead. (Side Winder, California Mountain Snake, and Bill are left for Volume 2.)
One aspect of Kill Bill that doesn't disappoint are the action sequences. Although no better than those in The Matrix Reloaded, they are fun to watch, as The Bride slices and dices her way through dozens of enemies, using hidden wires to do Crouching Tiger-like moves. Tarantino has designed Kill Bill as an homage to the Hong Kong movies he dearly loves, and it accomplishes that. There is so much blood that it's virtually impossible not to laugh as gallons of it spew like a fountain from a decapitated head. The level of gore is so over-the-top that only the most sensitive of viewers will be grossed-out. Tarantino is going for campy comedy in these cases rather than realism.
One could argue that the best thing about Pulp Fiction was the delicious dialogue, and that's something almost completely absent here. The number of quotable lines and memorable non-action sequences is small. Stylistically, the film is clearly Tarantino's - it's a colorful, high-energy production filled with little cultural in-jokes (including a reference to an "old Klingon proverb"). One entire flashback sequence is presented in anime, some scenes are in black-and-white, and there are plenty of "cool" moments (such as Lucy Liu and her posse approaching the camera in slow motion). The music is nearly all from the '70s, featuring both pop songs and film score snippets. Kill Bill is many things, but for the most part, it's not boring.
I say "for the most part" because Tarantino could have used the services of a less generous editor. Volume 1 could have been a lot tighter. There's a lot of padding to be found here, and it's probably the result of trying to stretch a single three-hour movie into two 105-minute features. I realize that Tarantino is in love with every minute of film he shot, but even the best directors have to give up some footage. Tarantino's unwillingness to do this gave Miramax ammunition to bisect the movie. Had every moment of Kill Bill been riveting, this might have been understandable, but we're left with half-a-movie that runs for too long.
As has become Tarantino's trademark, events (which are presented in a series of chapters) do not unfold chronologically. Movies are typically shot out of sequence; this one is shown out of sequence. While I can understand the placement of the flashback background, there are other instances when the non-linear progression has no purpose other than to be contrary to the norm. Why show revenge #2 before revenge #1? There doesn't seem to be a reason. Maybe it will all become clear in Volume 2, although I somehow doubt it.
As far as the performances go, there's not much to comment upon. Uma Thurman does a credible job as the Termanatrix-like killing machine. We admire her tenacity but never identify with the character. (This is a problem with a revenge flick, where we're supposed to root for the hero and despise the enemy. Neither is the case here, especially since we never see Bill.) Lucy Liu is one of Charlie's Angels converted to the Dark Side. Vivica A. Fox has almost no screen time. Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, and David Carradine are being held back for Volume 2. One could make a good argument that legendary Japanese star Sonny Chiba does the best acting job with his supporting role as a sword-maker.
Throughout Kill Bill, I got the sense that Tarantino thinks he is being more clever than he actually is. This is easily the worst of Tarantino's four features (the other three being Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown). At this point, it's difficult to tell whether the story as a whole is worth telling - that judgment will have to await the release of Volume 2. But, based on what's available for the time being, I can only recommend Kill Bill for die-hard Tarantino buffs and Hong Kong action junkies. Everyone else would do better to stay away and avoid the bitter disappointment of seeing how the greed of a distributor can degrade the movie-going experience.
In the wake of "Reservoir Dogs," "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown," film buffs have come to expect intrepid sub-Hollywood scavenger Quentin Tarantino to bowl us over with ingenious, amped-up, style-blending B-movie off-shoots made with a quantum leap of depth and cinematic panache.
Influenced by cut-rate, under-the-counter samurai imports, spaghetti Westerns and popcorn-munching exploitation flicks of bygone eras, the writer-director's two-part revenge saga "Kill Bill" ("Volume 2" is due in February) has sexy, gritty, droll, deluxe Tarantino �lan coming out its ears -- and absurdly grisly dam-bursts of stage blood spurting from other violently severed body parts in ambitious marathon swordfight scenes. But while the picture oozes style (and blood), it comes up short on substance -- which is what has always set Tarantino's grindhouse homages head and shoulders above the pulp pictures that inform them.
Choreographed by both kung-fu genius Yuen Wo-Ping ("The Matrix" movies, "Charlie's Angels," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," etc.) and Japanese Kenjutsu legend Sonny Chiba (who plays an eccentric master sword-maker in the film), these focal-point fights are the culmination of a plot about a sultry, strong-willed former assassin (Uma Thurman) who was left for dead when her employer -- possibly peeved by her resignation, although "Volume 1" is vague on that point -- turned her wedding into a massacre.
Waking up after six years in a coma, The Bride (whose name is bleeped out whenever mentioned in an enigmatic touch of Tarantino whimsy) is out to execute every last one of her former associates who helped kill her groom and guests. After willing the atrophy from her dormant limbs and snuffing a lowlife hospital intern who had been pimping her inert body to perverts, in "Volume 1" The Bride hunts down "Copperhead" (Vivica A. Fox), now a suburban mommy whose young daughter who comes home from school in the middle of their kitchen-knife duel, and O-Ren Ishi (Lucy Liu), a deadly flower of sword-slinging, geisha femininity who has become Tokyo's most feared yakuza mob boss.
Giving a minxy, magnetic performance that speaks of her professional chemistry with Tarantino, Thurman imbibes and embodies the impetus for her murder streak, but save a sense of humor that comes out in the occasional snappy line of dialogue, there's not much depth to The Bride. Her targets too, while played by good actors, are little more than vaguely fleshed-out cartoons -- in one case literally. O-Ren's super-violent childhood backstory is presented as an anime flashback, a decision I suspect was less of a creative nod to Japanese cartoons than it was a way to skirt an NC-17 rating for several gory, blood-gushing murders.
The same editorial/artistic slight-of-hand can be seen in a black-and-white sequence and another in silhouette during the spectacular climactic swordfight, which ranges all over a two-story Japanese restaurant and into a snowy tea garden as The Bride slays literally dozens of Katana-wielding, Kato-masked yakuza on her way to facing off against O-Ren. But while this artifice may have hoodwinked the MPAA, the cumulative gross-out effect of the over-the-top bloodletting -- no matter what visual form it takes, no matter what low-budget Japanese sword-genre flicks inspired it, and no matter how deliberately cheap and silly it looks -- eventually becomes an annoying distraction from the extraordinary, steel-bladed blitz of the fights themselves.
"Kill Bill: Volume 1" does exhibit Tarantino's gift for coalescing idiosyncratic performances, cinematic self-awareness, irregular narrative, creative camerawork and a wide variety of pop-referencing soundtrack music into a shrewd, synergistic whole. But that whole -- or at least this first half of it -- isn't quite the sum of its dynamic parts.
Blood doesn't just flow in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. 1" � it splatters and spurts and rises in fountains so baroque and luxuriant that there are moments when it seems as if it were raining red. It isn't, but only because there's little in this private fetish of a movie that relates to the natural world. Despite the occasional glimpse of the not-so-great outdoors, the first half of Tarantino's two-part anti-epic isn't about life � it's about movie-made death in all its spectacular and foolish excess.
For the first time in Tarantino's filmmaking career, the written story � both in word and development � proves the least interesting part of the whole equation. A woman simply called the Bride (Uma Thurman) wakes from a coma and sets about hunting down those who put her in cold storage. The film jumps a few times between the past and present, but the time warps in this section of the film are strictly generic. The past haunts the Bride and gives her a mission � she's out for some serious payback � but her director clearly wants to get going. He wants to rack up her enemies so she can knock 'em down, which is precisely what the Bride and her shadow groom do for 93 minutes of psycho-to-psycho slaughter.
A blood-soaked valentine to movies, "Vol. 1" is the ultimate film-geek freakout, a compendium of 1960s and 1970s cine-references from blaxploitation to Japanese yakuza, classic chopsocky and spaghetti westerns. But this is no ordinary movie love. From the moment that the logo "ShawScope" flashes in the opening credits (a nod at the legendary Hong Kong studio), it's apparent that Tarantino is striving for more than an off-the-rack mash note or a pastiche of golden oldies. It is, rather, his homage to movies shot in celluloid and wide, wide, wide, wide screen � an ode to the time right before movies were radically secularized, before they were slabs of plastic to be rented, slapped into a home-video player, tossed and forgotten in the backseat of a car. Back to the moment when moviegoing was our great collective ritual.
There's something sweet about Tarantino's cinephilia � it's his old-time religion. In "Vol. 1" he uses snatches of music from one type of movie � say, a snippet from one of Ennio Morricone's scores for a Sergio Leone western � and lays it over a bit of Japanese-flavored mayhem. Sampling movies like a D.J., Tarantino uses other artists' beats and images to scratch out his own tune. This sort of playful mix-master technique has its seductions, but there are dangers to getting hooked on other people's genius. . The penultimate battle royale in a Japanese nightclub has moments of great graphic beauty amid the spurting severed limbs, yet the scene's most stunning tableau � a silhouette of the Bride squaring off against some heavies � is borrowed from Seijun Suzuki, an eccentric master of the yakuza film.
This kind of mad movie love explains Tarantino's approach and ambitions, and it also points to his limitations as a filmmaker. His multiple references are inescapably entertaining � it's like watching a movie programmer strut his cool stuff � but there can be something distracting about them as well. (Unable to place a few titles, I started to feel like one of those losers on "Jeopardy.") Worse, they can show Tarantino at his clever worst rather than his clever best. His previous films have been stuffed to the gills with movie allusions. But what made those films rock weren't the salutes to Hong Kong shoot-'em-ups, it was the anguish in Tim Roth's voice as his character bled to death, the shock of John Travolta's assassin meeting his end on the can, the lyrical stillness of Pam Grier's face.
It's unsettling that "Vol. 1" gets so much of its juice from other movies. Tarantino clearly wants us to take pleasure in the groovy kicks and wild style he has thrilled to over the years � the Bride's opening fight against queenly beauty Vivica A. Fox takes place in the key of Pam Grier. But the movie love can make it hard to hear the human pulse beneath the noise (it's there, if faint), much less see if there's anything new going on. Connoisseurs of exploitation films � in particular, extreme Asian cinema � will likely find the tsunamis of blood and flying body parts gory fun, as well as old (headless) hat. But I think Tarantino wants to do more than flatter his hard-core loyalists; greater ambition pulses through this movie, however misdirected.
The total running time for "Kill Bill" is rumored to be a mind-blowing 3 hours � not as long as the 195 minutes for "Schindler's List" but more generous than the comparatively humble 166 minutes for "Gangs of New York." Although originally scheduled to be released in one long, uninterrupted slab, it has been broken into two sections, with the second half scheduled to open in the graveyard month of February. The reasons for the division have been widely reported, but mostly seem to boil down to the fact that Tarantino, Miramax or both believed the film would be served better if it were chopped in half. It hasn't been. "Kill Bill Vol. 1" doesn't end � it just stops dead in its tracks, throwing off the film's slow-building rhythm.
Given that "Vol. 1" is half a movie, it's impossible at this stage to know whether Tarantino has anything more on his mind than movies, whether the characters will deepen significantly and something more meaningful will emerge than clich�s about honor and vengeance. "Vol. 1" arrives in theaters after six years of filmmaking quiet from a man who was once the most famous director in the country and � it's worth remembering � made a few great features. Tarantino may have done himself a disservice by staying away so long. Not only because the pressure for him to succeed will be more than any one filmmaker should have to contend with, but also because directors need to shoot movies and more movies, not just watch them.
Overstuffed with too many big-set ambitions, even as it also comes up short on fresh ideas, "Vol. 1" feels like the work of a director who's not just trying to top other directors but his own reputation. Given this, it's ironic that the best scene in the first section is a quiet exchange between the Bride and a sushi chef played by martial-arts actor and legend Sonny Chiba. Warmly funny and played to the rhythms of real conversation, the scene shows Tarantino at his finest. The characters' give and take � along with a terrific anime section and Lucy Liu's fiercely imperial performance as a yakuza boss � are what make "Vol. 1" add up to more than extreme gore and self-adoring virtuosity.
During the 1990s, no other filmmaker captured our American pop moment better than Tarantino. His exciting, free-associative gloss of irony, bent humor and geek love was intoxicating, and it hit the zeitgeist with a resounding thwack. But watching "Kill Bill Vol. 1" reminded me that no one can live on pop culture alone � certainly no artist � and made me regret too that so many filmmakers in this country think that they have to write and direct their own movies to be auteurs. Although he's most celebrated for volleying banter laced with expletives, pulp truths and pop philosophy, Tarantino's filmmaking talent has never been in doubt; he shoots and cuts with the best of them. The question now is if he has anything left to say.