Film Review: KILL BILL, VOL. 1 *** (out of 5)
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, 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 like 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 Ishii, a.k.a. Cottonmouth. Beautifully designed and executed by the Japanese company 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.
Kill Bill, Vol. 1
directed by Quentin Tarantino; screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, from character created by “Q and U” (Quentin and Uma); director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Sally Menke; music by The RZA
with Uma Thurman (The Bride/Black Mamba), David Carradine (Bill), Lucy Liu (O-Ren Ishii/Cottonmouth), Daryl Hannah (Elle Driver/California Mountain Snake)
1 hr., 50m., a Band Apart-Super Cool Manchu production, Miramax; rated R
release date: October 10
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.
