"Kill Bill: Vol. 1"

Quentin Tarantino supposedly loves movies. So why is this ultraviolent, style-crazed revenge fantasy so empty?

By Stephanie Zacharek

Oct 10, 2003 | There are some movies that awaken a sense of wonder, making you feel as if you've never seen a movie before. And there are others that make you feel as if you've seen way too many, with a 1,000-pound encyclopedia of visual references and verbal cues chained to your neck the whole time. These pictures are usually made by people who profess to love movies, but they throw off very little love at all -- they're too saturated with self-awareness to reflect any warmth or light. Such movies are usually made by directors who are hell-bent on telling us how much they know, without bothering to show us why it's worth knowing in the first place. Under the pretense of spreading their movie love to the masses, they're really just hogging it for themselves.

Quentin Tarantino has said that his latest movie, "Kill Bill: Vol. 1," is his grindhouse picture, an homage to the martial arts movies, spaghetti Westerns and Japanese animation that he devoured happily, first as a kid growing up in Southern California and later as an adult, when Hong Kong action cinema began to wow American audiences in the mid-'80s. Tarantino is clearly exhilarated by his sources, and there are places in "Kill Bill" when he forgets how wicked-awesome it is to be a movie director and actually makes something that looks like a movie -- in other words, something that transports us instead of merely impressing us.

But enthusiastic as Tarantino is about samurai sword-fights and Chinese stage acrobatics and torsos that spurt candy-colored blood after they've been divested of their limbs and heads, "Kill Bill" feels flat and listless, even in the midst of its nonstop whirlwind of action and violence. Tarantino didn't skimp on talent: He hired perhaps the best fight choreographer in the world, Yuen Woo-ping, who choreographed the "Matrix" movies and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and is a near-legendary filmmaker in his own right. (Tarantino presented his "Iron Monkey" in the United States.) Veteran Japanese film and TV star Sonny Chiba appears in the picture as a master sword craftsman; he also trained the film's stars, Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu, in Japanese swordfighting technique. (Never mind that David Carradine, whose role in the '70s TV series "Kung Fu" made him an icon, appears -- at least momentarily -- as the Bill of the movie's title.)

But "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" is movie as bingo card. Even at its swiftest, you get the sense that Tarantino filled it in square by square, challenging himself see how much he could pack into it, instead of forcing himself into the Zen discipline of impeccable pacing and movement. A lot happens in "Kill Bill"; in fact, a lot happens in the first 10 minutes, when Thurman and Vivica A. Fox, as mortal enemies who used to be members of the same elite hit squad, fling each other around a suburban living room, crashing into a glass coffee table and jabbing at one another with a fireplace poker.

Tarantino has gone to a great deal of trouble to make an aggressively fun movie, and every ounce of sweat shows. Thurman is "the Bride," also known by her secret hit-woman code name, "Black Mamba." She also has a real name, but we don't know what it is -- every time she utters it, it's bleeped out. We're obviously being set up for a big revelation in the second half of the roughly three-hour "Kill Bill" epic, which will be released in February. ("Kill Bill" was originally intended as one long film, but Tarantino and his studio, Miramax, decided to release it as two separate movies instead of chopping the original cut to shreds.)

In the movie's opening sequence, we see the Bride, bruised and battered and bloody, filmed in velvety black-and-white. She's lying on a wood floor dressed in white. She's also pregnant. A man with a gun stands nearby to finish her off; this is Bill, who's highly displeased with her for reasons we don't yet know. Somehow the Bride survives the assault, and sets out to kill, one by one, the people who had done their best to off her.

The people on her to-kill list include the upscale suburban housewife and mom whose code name is "Copperhead" (Fox), the angular Amazon known as "California Mountain Snake" (Daryl Hannah, who makes a fantastic appearance in an eye patch and a surrealist white velvet coat printed with trompe-l'oeil belts and buckles) and, most significantly, O-Ren Ishii (Liu), aka "Cottonmouth," the regal ruler of the Yakuza. O-Ren has the delicate beauty of an orange blossom, but thinks nothing of lopping a guy's head off at a board meeting just because he's said something that offends her. The Bride tracks down her nemeses one by one -- she does some of her truckin' in a '70s pop-art relic, a van with "Pussy Wagon" painted in cartoon script on the back -- dispatching each one in ever-messier ways.

With "Kill Bill," Tarantino worships at the temple of style, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. He and his cinematographer Robert Richardson pay close attention to details, and their acuity can be deeply pleasurable: The Bride travels to Tokyo to find O-Ren, showing up at the latter's favorite nightspot, the House of Blue Leaves (perhaps the first nightclub ever to take its name from a John Guare play, but it works). The house band there is a trio of petite surf punkettes -- they're played by the real-life Japanese outfit the 5.6.7.8's -- who wield their guitars like the Ramones, even though they're wearing sheath dresses and bouffants and have bare feet. The Bride strides into this scene wearing a yellow motocross-style jacket and leggings, like the love child of Steve McQueen and Emma Peel (the latter of whom Thurman has already played, of course, in another movie).

The House of Blue Leaves sequence is the movie's magnificent windup, and it's beautifully orchestrated. The Bride fends off an army of black-suited baddies -- their faces are hidden by sleek, molded Cato masks, a nod to Bruce Lee's character on "The Green Hornet" -- until they're lying scattered around the club floor in a mini indoor re-creation of the famous train-station scene in "Gone With the Wind," moaning and waving what's left of their arms and legs. (Their ragged-edged, bloody spare parts are strewn around them like discarded toys.)

Next Page: O-Ren and the Bride's balletic, elegant snow-garden showdown

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