***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, Perla Haney-Jardine, Samuel L. Jackson, and Chris Nelson
Directed by Quentin Tarantino & written by Tarantino and Uma Thurman
2004
137 min R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2004
“Kill Bill: Volume 1” is a complete, self-contained statement. It is art commenting on art, or at least pulp commenting on pulp. If you lost sleep over its cliffhanger ending, lack of backstory, or any of its other dozen loose ends, I think you missed the point. A lifetime of adventure movies and melodramas prepared us to fill in all those blanks ourselves, perhaps even unconsciously, and the movie ended up being a playful examination of all our favorite clichés. Or something. Strictly speaking, it needs no sequel, prequel, explanation, or anything else.
Now along comes “Kill Bill: Volume 2.” Just to let you know, in case your time in the woodshed making bombs has kept you from watching television or wasting time on the internet, both volumes of “Kill Bill” were originally intended by writer-director Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction,” “Jackie Brown”) to be presented as a single gargantuan film. It was the decision of executive producer Harvey Weinstein to separate the two, and the separation is a surprisingly good one. Not only is “Volume 1” a complete statement, but “Volume 2” has a markedly different tone and ideas. “Volume 1” is all action and in-jokes, while “Volume 2,” which deals with past histories and relationships, dare I say veers into the territory of actually being about something. I know, I’m stunned, but “Kill Bill” might be more than just art for art’s sake. Tarantino takes his caricatures, develops them through a web of stock B movie and paperback elements, and we find ourselves looking at what may actually be a treatise, however off-kilter, on our relationship to violence.
Let’s take a quick detour here to get the synopsis out of the way and then we’ll get back to Tarantino’s examination of morality-as-good-art vs. violence-as-bad-art. An ex-assassin known only as The Bride (Uma Thurman) is out to avenge herself against her former master and lover Bill (David Carradine), who betrayed her on her wedding day. First The Bride must dispatch Bill’s underlings—no reason why the underlings should die first is given, it’s just an action movie thing—including Budd (Michael Madsen) and Elle (Daryl Hannah). She already took out some other troublemakers in “Volume 1.”
Now her quest brings her to the beautifully photographed American southwest, where she must tear a doublewide to pieces, get buried alive, and roam through Mexico in search of her nemesis. Most of this is done with samurai swords, although some guns are thrown in for good measure, and there is a lengthy flashback to The Bride’s youthful training in China, which is done in precisely the style of a 1970s kung-fu movie. The 1000-year-old master looks like a thirty-year-old in bad makeup, training consists of repeatedly punching a wall, and Tarantino has a delightful time zooming in and out at a second’s notice. As with “Volume 1,” this is not a dreary slog through vengeance and anger, but an exuberant and even joyous labor of love, a movie just wild about being a movie. “Kill Bill” also has Tarantino’s trademark sense of humor, in which people always have a clever profanity handy.
Back to the hard part, and try to follow me on this. At its simplest level, the motivation behind “Kill Bill” is to make a bad movie very, very well. It’s a hackneyed plot built out of junk food entertainments like kung-fu movies, comic books, and cheap pulp paperbacks. These are all things we shouldn’t love, diversions that for the most part should be beneath us, but we love them anyway. What’s the story of “Kill Bill?” Revenge. And what are people more ambivalent about than anything else? Violence. It doesn’t solve anything, it’s bad bad bad, vengeance is God’s, so on and so forth—and yet we can’t stop watching it. It’s not just that fistfights can be as beautiful and kinetic as ballet or scored and tallied like football games. It’s pain and life-and-death that we enjoy seeing. The clamor of battle is something we shouldn’t love, but we do anyway.
There’s a swordfight of insane proportions in “Volume 1” that many who saw the film, even its admirers, called “cartoonish” and left at that. But there was a degree of terror, of screaming, of palpable pain that kept that explanation from sitting completely well with me. In “Volume 2,” a perfectly innocent little girl steps on a goldfish just to see what happens. Bill and the Bride have a conversation while using truth serum which begins with him discussing the subtext of Superman, and from there Bill lectures the Bride—and perhaps the audience—on how she has a killer inside of her and there’s nothing she can do about it. No action movie cliché of “living a normal life” can rob us of our inherent bloodlust. We try to master it and keep it at bay—possibly by watching movies like “Kill Bill”—but there it is.
Or did Tarantino’s movie just fool me? Is all this talk of the “duality of man” just another bit of B movie tripe that Tarantino gave a polish and tossed at us as part of the joke? Who knows.
Page two of "Kill Bill: Volume 2." Back to home.