"Kill Bill: Vol. 1"

What follows is even more spectacular: O-Ren and the Bride find themselves face to face in the club's snowy garden, a dream landscape of shadowy whites and blues and leafy greens. O-Ren wears a formal kimono, complete with sandals and tabi socks; the Bride, who's wearing a much more practical outfit, seems to have the edge. But their Kenjutsu showdown isn't an easy call, as the two women bob and weave and leap through the air, taunting one another with their flashing swords, accessories that are both practical and chic. They move in sweeping, overlapping, tensile arcs; their venomous hatred for each other, translated into movement, becomes a kind of love. The scene's violence is balletic in the style of John Woo and Sam Peckinpah, but it's more elegant, and more archly feminine, than anything those directors have typically given us. It's what we might have gotten if the late, great style doyenne Diana Vreeland had tried her hand at directing an action movie.

If one terrific sequence -- and this is an elaborate, extended one -- could make a whole movie, "Kill Bill" would be a masterpiece. But by the time of the snow garden showdown, Tarantino has done his best to wear us down. With the exception of a lovely, muted section in which the Bride travels to Okinawa to beg the craftsman and swordmaster Hattori Hanzo (Chiba, who brings so much warmth and humanity to his role that you wish the movie gave us more of him) to make a spectacular weapon for her, "Kill Bill" feels much too taken with its own hip vision. If you've seen even just a smattering of Hong Kong action movies made anytime in the past 30 years, you'll recognize all of Tarantino's riffs, including characters who are obsessed with honor and duty, and brutality that's so heightened and extreme it becomes a form of abstract art.

Tarantino loves the speed and glory and shivery thrill of violence, and he's smart about staging it: Technically, his fight sequences are pretty much flawless. But while plenty of critics and moviegoers have praised him for his craftsmanlike approach to onscreen brutality, not many have spent much time probing his attitude toward that violence.

Miramax has allegedly voiced some concerns that "Kill Bill" will be a turnoff to women, who, in the company's view, aren't likely to flock to a picture that's as graphic and barbarous as this one is. But if anyone, man or woman, shrinks from the bloodlust of "Kill Bill," it's misguided to automatically chalk their reservations up to squeamishness.

The final tally of blood-gushing torsos, bloody eyeballs and crushed heads means nothing; a filmmaker's attitude toward those things means everything. There's something sadistic about the way Tarantino approaches violence. It didn't set right with me in "Pulp Fiction," and it doesn't set right with me here. ("Jackie Brown," on the other hand, suggests to me that if Tarantino can kick his obsession with being a hotshot director, he may turn out to be a great one -- in "Jackie Brown," Tarantino's love of genre movies melds inextricably with his love for his characters, and that makes all the difference.)

For part of "Kill Bill," the Bride lies comatose in a hospital, and we learn that an orderly has been pimping her out, making money off her limp, unconscious body. When one of her "clients" arrives, the orderly lays down the rules: No biting and no hitting, although, he adds, because her "plumbing" doesn't work anymore, "Feel free to come in her as much as you want." As a kicker, he holds up a grimy, gritty jar of "Vaselube," a necessity because the poor Bride is so dried up.

The Bride's paramour, salivating and hairy and boorish, advances upon her, and there's something crass and ugly about the fact that Tarantino is using a rape to get laughs. (This particular incident turns out to be an attempted rape, but we know that the Bride has already been violated repeatedly.) The subtext seems to be that because the Bride gets her revenge -- and it's suitably nasty -- it's OK to make elaborate misogynist jokes at her expense beforehand.

But I don't think it is OK. The pre-rape preamble is graphic and lascivious, and Tarantino intends it to be titillating. The rapist is portrayed as a hillbilly-trucker type, which, I guess, is supposed to be a signal that he's not like you and me and shouldn't be taken seriously. If you quizzed Tarantino about this, he might say that the crime needs to be portrayed as over-the-top and unthinkable in order to make the woman's need for revenge that much more palpable. But he's obviously spent a lot of time working out the details of the rape, and he goes a long way in helping us to imagine what it might be like from the aggressor's point of view.

And remember, this is the body of Uma Thurman we're talking about: Sure, there are people out there who fantasize about having sex with a comatose beauty. But what does it mean to have Tarantino working overtime to dangle that fantasy in front of his audience, supposedly waggling a finger about how wrong it is, even as he's practically cooing, "Come on, guys -- wouldn't you do it, given the chance?" I don't think you need to be a woman to find that distasteful; if anything, I think it's more insulting to men.

Purist fans of Asian action movies might say that rape-revenge fantasies are common in those pictures, and they're right. But again, attitude means everything. "Kill Bill" is carefully wrought and worked out -- it's not as if Tarantino didn't have the time or the means or the smarts to figure out a way to make the rape-revenge convention work, stylistically and thematically.

I have no doubt that Tarantino loves the genres that "Kill Bill" borrows from. Even so, the movie comes off too much like a fan's scrapbook and not enough like its own fully rounded vision -- as if Tarantino were holding us captive on a moldy postgraduate couch somewhere, subjecting us to 90 minutes worth of his favorite movie clips strung together, accompanied by an exhausting running commentary along the lines of "Isn't this great? Isn't this cool?"

He's not totally wrong: Sometimes this stuff is cool. Sometimes it's even great. But Tarantino's zombielike devotion to style also puts him at an emotional remove, a barrier if he's going to make the most of his gifts as a filmmaker. As visually arresting as "Kill Bill" often is, there's a stultifying blankness about it. Despite Tarantino's obvious enthusiasms, he comes off jaded and cynical: He's seen plenty of movies, and this is his proof. "Kill Bill" is one long yakkety-yak about Tarantino's passions. He's the samurai who won't shut up.

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