The fast and furious Kill Bill Volume 1 should work for nearly any movie fan. You’ve got your action freak. You’ve got your film geek. You’ve got your run-of-the-mill, plop-’em-down-in-front-of-anything-and-watch-’em-slobber moviegoer. And you’ve got your Quentin Tarantino naysayer: ‘Sure, Pulp Fiction was pretty good but an obvious fluke. And Jackie Brown? C’mon!’ Even the most unwilling viewer will bend under the iron will of this smashing action flick and its dark, bloody heart.
Kill Bill opens with a grisly black-and-white shot of a woman on her wedding day. She lies beaten and bloody, begging her tormentor for salvation. Just as she reveals she’s pregnant, a crashing gunshot is fired at her head. Unluckily for said tormentors the enigmatic Bill and his Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS) The Bride (Uma Thurman) has been left comatose but not dead. Four years later, The Bride awakens and realizes that her former team members have betrayed her. The rest of Kill Bill charts this woman’s madcap, epic quest for justice.
Kill Bill wades through basic Tarantino territory: some people make cataclysmic mistakes, others experience changes for the better and the worse and most seek bold, brutal vengeance. All the usual Tarantino window dressing jarring close-ups coupled with quick cuts, a chronologically altered story, extremely dark humor and one of the best soundtracks of the year appears throughout the film.
Kill Bill plays like the ultimate mash-up of samurai film ethos, intense camerawork and just about any other element from any other film genre you can imagine (and what else would you expect from Mr. T., the man who worked at Video Archives into his late 20’s?). Heck, even the animation team manages to seamlessly interweave the Japanime-flavored flashback and make it more wrenching than any of the live-action stuff.
Fear not, though: Kill Bill never veers into that trendy quagmire known as postmodern use of cinematic pastiche. Instead of giving us a high-gloss, high-irony flick with fakety-fake characters, Tarantino creates a very palpable universe ruled by strict codes of behavior, honor and redemption.
Imagine an actual world in which feuding ninjas break into fights at any moment and women have the same predatory, hunting instincts as men. Picture Tarantino capturing the humanity inside this unreal world; and you’d be pretty close to the action-packed masterpiece that is Kill Bill.
Surely, the naysayers will accuse Tarantino of ripping off Japanese movies, squeezing them into an indulgent four hours, dividing that by two and calling it his own. With Tarantino, the formula is never that simple. Kill Bill may duplicate dozens of genre sources, but that’s not quite the point. Instead of merely appropriating cultural material, Tarantino filters and transforms it through the sensibility of an eternally devoted American fan. His cinematic imagination functions as a melting pot that reveals the bonds between seemingly opposite genres.
That said, Kill Bill could easily be subtitled ‘Babefest ’03.’ We’ve got: the always titillating, turbo-bitchy Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii, the first female head honcho of the Japanese yazuka underworld; Splash-from-the-past Daryl Hannah, who gives a simmering, anxiety-ridden (and uproarious) performance as nurse Elle Driver; and, of course, Thurman herself as the leather-clad hero who slices up hundreds of classically trained samurais, fights her way back from paralysis in just 13 hours and drives a Mystery Machine-inspired getaway car named the ‘Pussy Wagon’ like all three Charlie’s Angels rolled into one drop-dead, ninja babe.
Thurman delivers a dynamic, often poignant portrayal coupled with total physical embodiment. She takes small, private moments and makes them acutely painful to watch without overdoing it. And like last year’s female Oscar winners, Uma stretches the limits of her own physicality watch as she jumps, flails, kicks, punches and dismembers with the best of ’em to fill out a larger-than-life, career-defining role.
The film’s sub-subtitle would undoubtedly be ‘Bloodbath ’03.’ Kill Bill thanks to the absence of fake-looking special effects used so often today is probably one of the most violent, gruesome flicks you’ll see. Try closing your eyes: true to the Tarantino aesthetic, the movement comes across loud, clear, and (when characters get impaled with swords) squishy on the soundtrack.
With a little patience, and the willingness to adapt to the strange world of Kill Bill, you’ll succumb to the mesmerizing gorgeousness of its en masse violence. Tarantino knows just when to stop Kill Bill contains not one extra swordstroke or unnecessary murder.
The decision to divide the film into two volumes (Tarantino’s original cut ran an unthinkable four hours) cannot hurt box-office prospects you will need to see Volume 2 to tie up loose ends from this first volume. With the stunning Kill Bill – Volume 1, Quentin Tarantino has succeeded in spinning an experimental mainstream film into an experience that will leave you shaken to the core and viscerally devastated.
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