Acting, to say the least, is awfully tricky when it comes to this material. With Liu, Madsen, Carradine, Darryl Hannah (sans an eyeball), Sonny Chiba, and Vivica A. Fox, Tarantino has collected a circa 1972 rogue’s gallery of tough sexiness and sexy toughness. The only movie this year with better faces might be “The Good Thief,” with it’s worn, craggy-faced burglars. The Deadly Vipers all play straight, no matter how goofy the dialogue, no matter how many sentences Vivica Fox begins and ends with the word “bitch.” Lucy Liu is surprisingly effective as the soft-spoken, light-footed, stone-faced geisha of death Bill has sent to rule Japan.
“Kill Bill” is more fun than “The X-Men,” “Spider-Man,” “Daredevil,” “The Lord of the Rings,” and both “Matrix” movies, if for no other reason than it is one of the few recent action giants that doesn’t take itself so bloody seriously (the other being “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” written and directed by Robert Rodriguez, who is credited in “Kill Bill” as “My brother”). If memory serves there are only three fight sequences in “Volume 1,” four if you count the Crazy 88s and Lucy Liu separately, which is a startingly low number if you’ve been to the movies lately (how many car chases did “Bad Boys II” have?). But they are battles par excellence, with blood, sweat, broken furniture, and swarms of bad guys attacking The Bride one-at-a-time. No one ever questions The Bride’s martial prowess because she’s a woman, which is one cliché I’m happy Tarantino didn’t feel obligated to brush off.
What’s the capital-M Meaning behind all this? I’m terrified of reading other criticisms of “Kill Bill,” terrified that the Meaning they find will be better than what I found. What I found was such a movie movie, a movie in love with all movies, warts and all, clichés and surprises, in love with handing us what we know is going to happen next on a wickedly-twisted silver platter.
“Kill Bill” is, above all, a director’s fantasy. Given carte blanche to exploit all those movies he loved as a kid, what Tarantino has done may not quite qualify as turning crap into art, but at least combines crap with art. In the same way he has combined the utterly silly with the genuinely sympathetic, Tarantino has melded sloppy editing and bad dialogue with some truly fantastic images and choreography. The snow-filled garden where Liu and Thurman do battle is gorgeous, the model of Tokyo is beautifully fake, the orange sky behind the model Air-O 737 is a credit to cinematographer Robert Richardson (“U-Turn,” “The Doors,” “Bringing Out the Dead,” “Platoon”). The movie is like this on deeper levels and is a celebration of all our guilty pleasures. The credits even feature the egotistical title card “The Fourth Film by Quentin Tarantino,” harkening back to those great days when “A Stanley Kubrick Production” was deemed worthy of appearing during an especially powerful moment of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
“Kill Bill” is a humongous in-joke for movie lovers, and what an in-joke. Tarantino has described “Volume 1” as the spaghetti western version of a kung-fu movie, and “Volume 2” as the kung-fu version of a spaghetti western. This, and the cliffhanger at the end of “Volume 1,” should give us an idea what “Volume 2” will be about, but does it really matter? “Kill Bill” is so gloriously pulpy, so conventional, that it could go on forever, or just as easily end with a cliffhanger that it never resolves. The entire experience is too much of a giant slap in the brain for me not to love.
Finished October 14, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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