Kill Bill, Volume 1
Review
by : Eric Barker
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Starring:
Uma Thurman (The Bride/Black Mamba), Lucy Liu (O-Ren
Ishi/Cottonmouth), Chiaki Kuriyama (GoGo Yubari), Sonny
Chiba (Hattori Hanzo)
Written
and Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
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A
deadly assassin seeks international revenge against the former
associates who tried to kill her on her wedding day.
“The
4th film by Quentin Tarantino” -- as the opening titles
winkingly proclaim Kill Bill, Volume 1 to be -- is
an ultra-violent, live-action-anime salute to trashy cult
movies and American pop from the seventies, an exaltation
of style for its own sake, and for all of its adrenalin-inducing
narrative skill, a strangely distant exercise in moviemaking.
 Surely
part of the film’s reserve is an unintended by-product
of being chopped into two installments by its distributor,
Miramax. The decision to do this was made at the last moment
for many reasons, not least of which was simply a distressing
trend toward the major studios chopping all of their tent
pole movies into two installments. As the audience is beginning
to figure out, if you split your spectacle into two release
dates, you double the potential box-office, provided the first
release generates enough good will. Naturally, with a film
originally designed to be absorbed in one sitting, there are
going to be more loose ends than in a season of the X-Files,
but that’s the point -- leave ‘em pondering the
quirks and unanswered flourishes, and they’ll come back
for more.
In the
case of Kill Bill, there’s a chance the strategy
will work. Tarantino is a film geek extraordinaire; he doesn’t
just immerse himself in martial arts epics and giant creature
features, he is familiar with the full panoply of cinematic
history and he knows that the best filmmakers make everything
personal. So he gives it a go: aside from Kill Bill’s
immense cross-referencing of pop culture bites, the film is
packed with wacky oddities that we never knew (but might have
suspected) about America‘s premier smart-ass auteur,
like his fetish for Uma Thurman’s feet, which receive
unusual, Panavision-sized attention in this installment. The
film has enough kooky blisters in its surface lacquer of kung
fu melodrama, I personally will be going back for Volume 2,
just to get another fix of Tarantino’s delirious, pinball
intelligence playing meta-havoc with movie conventions.
But it
is also Tarantino’s undeniable smarts that produce the
distancing effect; if they gave Oscars for self-consciousness,
he’d be ready for a life achievement award. Kill
Bill is purposely shallow, purposely about nothing except
the surfaces of its strictly movie world, so that even Tarantino
trademarks, such as the nonlinear ordering of scenes, become
just one more idea he’s tossing off in a story conference:
Look, it’s fun to tell a story out of order, and the
literary-style revelations fall into place anyway. It’s
palindromic!
There
was already a sense of Tarantino trying to hide with his last
film, Jackie Brown (1997), which experimented with
being all kinds of things that Pulp Fiction (1994)
wasn’t -- subdued, evenly paced, light on the jokes,
its plot completely driven by character. Kill Bill
is another, even more curious dance with audience expectations,
Tarantino stripping it all down until nothing is left but
the sheen -- no loquacious hitmen to dazzle us with their
philosophical wit, no enigmatic heroine saving her best moves
until they’re most needed -- only uproarious, carnographic,
over-the-top death and mayhem, breathtakingly staged, photographed
and edited.
Kill
Bill, Volume 1 is Tarantino’s lightest, fastest
movie, though it has a higher body count than his other three
films put together and squared. There are suggestions that
more could be going on than we know about thus far, especially
in the film’s cleverly multiplying revenge plots, but
there is no way to know for sure without the second half as
a proof. And we can blame Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein
if we want to, for cutting the film into two halves, but Tarantino
agreed to the demand. Given the extant film, which is both
eminently exciting and just plain exhausting, the reasons
seem to be less about pure greed than they are about the director’s
unwillingness to part with a single frame. After ninety minutes
of Tarantino’s bottomless self-indulgence in fake blood,
infantile rudeness, slapstick nihilism, and his own status
as a leading guru of cinematic postmodernism, a looming four
or five month break is a great relief.
Tarantino
isn’t in love with this material -- if he was, he would
find a way to make us care more about Kill Bill’s
B-movie simulacra, which have taken over the asylum here to
replace anything-resembling-real-people-or-places-or-emotion.
Instead, he is infatuated with his own fascinations, and there’s
no reasoning with the horny. It’s telling that the movie’s
most involving chapter is an animated flashback, unveiling
the backstory for Lucy Liu’s character, O-Ren Ishi,
a.k.a. Cottonmouth. Beautifully designed and executed by Japan’s
Production I.G., the sequence transcends its purpose as just
one more, empty narrative trick, and provides the only meaningful
passage in the film’s otherwise ridiculous tidal waves
of gore.
Maybe
my own dissatisfaction is linked to the two-part release pattern,
maybe Kill Bill, Volume 2 will break through my own resistance,
but if so, big deal: I only have this movie to go on, and
this movie is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. If it
had been Tarantino’s second feature back in 1994, he
would have vanished in the stampede of independent, wannabe
moguls, never to make Pulp Fiction or Jackie
Brown. But because he put the zap on everyone’s
head once upon a time, a lot of critics and tastemakers are
giving him a very wide latitude, forgiving his offenses in
a way that they wouldn’t forgive George Lucas, or Francis
Coppola, or Woody Allen, or the Coen Brothers, or Michael
Cimino, or Kevin Smith. Or Yuen Wo-Ping (see Notes).
Tarantino
needs to get out more, he needs to make more movies quicker
and sweat some of the excess smugness from his system, that’s
what’s wanted. Wealth has dimmed his bulb; like Elvis,
he has no one around him to tell him when he’s full
of baloney. Maybe with a little circulation among the real
people, he could produce a work of pop art with as much heart,
and tension, and style, as some of the films he’s quasi-emulating
here, like Iron Monkey (1993) and Akira
(1988) and The Wild Bunch (1969).
Kill
Bill, Volume 1 feels like a big, expensive student film,
a regression to pre-Reservoir Dogs consciousness,
perhaps made by a teen fanboy who doesn’t really get
Tarantino. And that’s okay, it’s a free country
with free enterprise, he can do whatever the hell he wants
to at this point, as long as it makes back its money. But
it would be a mistake to confuse this movie with something
vital: it’s apocalypse without the burn, pure energy
without focus, Tarantino without the love, an attractive painting
on rice paper waiting to dissolve at the first rain.
Notes:
FOR THOSE
NOT IN THE KNOW: The film’s fight director, Yuen Wo-Ping,
directed the trend-setting Iron Monkey mentioned
above (produced by Tarantino), and was the innovative martial
arts choreographer for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
(2000) and The Matrix series.
WHAT OTHERS
SAID:
“The
movie is not about anything at all except the skill and humor
of its making. It‘s kind of brilliant.”
-- Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
“There's
a real thrill-essence here; Kill Bill just leaves
you feeling excited: pointlessly, wildly excited. How many
films can do that?”
-- Peter
Bradshaw, The Guardian
“I
felt the way I sometimes do at a Mark Morris dance piece that
reshuffles familiar, showbizzy moves into something new and
funny and unexpectedly lyrical. Kill Bill literally
becomes a dance movie in the course of the final battle...It's
like An American in Paris with arterial spray.”
-- David
Edelstein, Slate
“Tarantino
layers slices from every chopsocky spaghetti western yakuza
blaxploitation flick he's ever seen on the already borrowed
premise of François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black,
spices these with stunts by Master Yuen Wo-Ping and themes
from '70s TV shows, then ladles a mess of anime sauce over
the whole Dagwood sandwich.”
-- J.
Hoberman, The Village Voice
“Mr.
Tarantino is an irrepressible showoff, recklessly flaunting
his formal skills as a choreographer of high-concept violence,
but he is also an unabashed cinephile, and the sincerity of
his enthusiasm gives this messy, uneven spectacle an odd,
feverish integrity.”
-- A.O.
Scott, The New York Times
“EXCEPT
- and this is where Quentin grabs the triple crown of Cinematic
Evolution from Spielberg, Lucas and the Wachowski’s…
KILL BILL isn’t just exploitation film inspired…
this is CINEMA, the whole… Everything from everywhere.”
-- Harry
Knowles, Ain’t It Cool News
Kill Bill
Vol. 2 opens Feb. 20, 2004.
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