**** (out of ****)
Starring Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Darryl Hannah, Sonny Chiba, Julie Dreyfus, Michael Parks, and Chiaki Kuriyama
Directed by Quentin Taratino & written by Tarantino and Uma Thurman
2003 R (very, very R)
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2003
Writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s gift to cinema is the ability to take characters and situations that are utterly ridiculous and trapped within the lowest, most pulpy genre conventions, and then surprise us by making us care. Think of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction,” the first with long, greasy hair, the second with obviously fake jerry-curls, both in matching black suits, both speaking in a heightened dialogue of impossibly clever witticisms and tough guy clichés. Think of “Jackie Brown,” with Samuel L. again, this time with a pharaoh beard, a pony tail, and a different-colored Kangol hat for every day of the week. How could we possibly sympathize with them? I don’t know how, but I did.
Now Q.T. is back on the warpath with “Kill Bill,” a crazed juggernaut of a picture that, at over three hours, proved to be too much of a behemoth for Miramax Pictures to market as only one movie. So it’s coming at us as “Volume 1” in October and “Volume 2” in February. “Volume 1” begins with perhaps the cheapest of many cheap shots, with an “old proverb” that has us thinking, for a second, “that’s not an old proverb, that’s just from…yeah, I thought so.” What’s in store for us? The basest combination of the two basest genres, the spaghetti western and the 1970s kung-fu movie, both of which mine, wallow in, and glorify pop culture dreck. Everyone in the movies nowadays knows kung-fu, whether they’re superheroes, computer-generated avatars, or 17th century French musketeers, and the result is often slick and mundane. It takes guts on Tarantino’s part to go back to the source and make a big-budget, low-budget martial arts spectacular, to elevate campy cheese to look like art, and to make a world that is so singularly his vision, yet still a childish mishmash of too much Saturday afternoon television. The world of “Kill Bill” is totally alien, yet a million times familiar to movie lovers everywhere.
We’re ensconced in a classic (or is “trite?”) revenge plot in which a samurai known to us only as The Bride (Uma Thurman), after four years in a coma, sets her sights on her betrayers, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. Yes, I thought all Vipers were Deadly, but apparently they need a modifier. Their leader is the unseen and velvet-voiced Bill, played by none other than David Carradine, who was, you guessed it, Kwai-Chang Cane on “Kung-Fu” and “Kung-Fu: The Legend Continues.” Their members have codenames like Cottonmouth, Copperhead, Black Mamba, and Sonja Fatale. No, wait, that’s Sonja’s real name.
What ensues, as The Bride begins her quest in America, Okinawa, and Japan, is all manner of ax-throwing, sword-swinging, limb-severing, glass shattering, eye-gouging, blood-squirting, cereal box-exploding mayhem, set to absurdly cheerful funk and the theme from “The Green Hornet.” Dialogue includes “what she lacked in age, she made up for in madness” and, spoken in Japanese to an entirely Japanese audience, “to emphasize how important this is, I will say it in English.” When The Bride is given possibly the finest blade in the world, she is warned “if you should encounter God, God will be cut.” In the meantime we learn that Air-O (which is short for Air Okinawa) will let you carry a katana onboard, motorcycles can be made with places to keep a sword, and that, when bad guys don’t have anything else to do, they’re perfectly content to sit still and stare forward.
Of course very little of this bears the slightest resemblance to anything that might pass for reality. As if held in an uneasy truce, the movie is told in the conflicting languages of the kung-fu movie and the spaghetti western. The first treats us to blurs of action, abrupt editing, so many pained grimaces, swords that always go “shink,” and movements that are emphasized with little “whooshing” noises. In an homage to B movies of old, Q.T. seems unable to do any shot-reverse shot without changing the position of someone’s arm or making some other inconsistency. The second style means that simple physical activities—like drawing your sword and looking at someone—take for-freaking-ever, and dialogue is replaced with narrowed, meaningful gazes, lots of music, and maybe a flashback or two.
And speaking of flashbacks—don’t get me started. Tarantino, famous for his nonlinear treatments of “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction,” has outdone himself with a story where the end is the beginning, the beginning is the end, the in-between is shaken like a maraca, and none of it is done for any purpose I can see except as a giant self-parody. Even the tangents have tangents, and Lucy Liu’s entire backstory is done in gritty, hand-drawn animation that seems to have been directed by Sergio Leone. Any activity, however slight, is likely to turn the world from color to black-and-white and throw us back in time “four years” or “four years and six months.” “Volume 1” does not get any more specific than that, but don’t be surprised if “Volume 2” has title cards like “four years, five months, one week, and four days ago.”
But the masterstroke of “Kill Bill” is that, well, I’ll be damned if I didn’t genuinely care about The Bride. Actress Uma Thurman, on the ropes since mistakes like “The Avengers” and “Batman and Robin,” plays The Bride more-or-less straight and wet-eyed, tapping the metal plate in her head one moment, in the next howling over the murders of The Groom and Her Unborn Child. Considering the milieu in which we find these scenes, they are surprisingly moving. She displays dread and exhaustion during a giant battle with the Crazy 88s. As she sheds their blood in huge, ludicrous quantities, we can’t help laughing, but as the blood keeps flowing we are treated to the empty waste of revenge. Even those she seeks to kill are philosophical about their doom. “She deserves her revenge,” says Sidewinder (Michael Madsen), “and we deserve to die.”
Page two of "Kill Bill Volume 1." Back to home.