KILL BILL, Vol. 1 (2003)  **

Reviewed 10/11/03

On the surface, KILL BILL looks like it was made for someone like me – a big fan of Japanese and Hong Kong action movies from all periods.  The movie is so filled with references and homages to these movies, particularly those from the 1970s, it would exhaust me to list them all in order to prove my street cred in this regard.  I’ll let some other super movie nerd create their own website devoted just to this purpose.  Except to say, maybe Tarantino has been watching too many Takashi Miike flicks lately.  Tarantino has said in interviews that he wanted to prove to himself with KILL BILL that he could direct action scenes.  Well, with choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping’s help, he can… to a degree.  It’s just that KILL BILL’s action scenes are always less successful than the scenes they are derived from whether that be LONE WOLF AND CUB or MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE.  And BILL certainly makes you care less than any of these films about what’s going to happen.

It’s a pretty basic revenge story with The Bride (Uma Thurman) going after members of the DiVAS (Deadly Viper Assassination Squad) who killed everyone but her on her wedding day.  The Bill (David Carradine, like Caine in "Kung Fu") of the title is the leader, and The Bride a former member.  The thing is none of these characters are remotely interesting.   The closest is Vivica A. Fox’s Vernita Green (aka Copperhead), a former assassin who just wants to be left alone in domesticity raising her daughter.  She’s the only person in the movie who seems to actually care whether she lives or dies.

Cutting the movie in two may not have actually hurt it that much.  It trades in immediate gratification of what happens (not that I care that much at this point) for a chance to rest.  The climatic 20-minute fight scene at the House Of Blue Leaves has some strong moments, particularly the segment where The Bride takes on 17-year old bodyguard Go Go Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama), but it quickly becomes mind-numbingly boring, ending with an anti-climatic fight with O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu).  Another 90 minutes of stuff after that, especially of similar material going through the last 3 members on The Bride’s list to be killed would have killed my brain.

Quentin Tarantino can put in the occasional nifty fight move.  What he doesn’t do well is set up an intelligible rhythm to the action or utilize extended martial arts strategy.  He certainly knows how to end an action sequence on a whimper instead of a crescendo.  Most of his actors also lack real grace and physicality.   Thurman may wear Bruce Lee's GAME OF DEATH jump suit, but well, she's got nothing on Bruce Lee.  Instead of making a movie that references a gazillion of his favorite movies, Tarantino should just make us a to-see list, which would be more rewarding than his trying to replicate them ineffectively.