Uma Thurman is the avenging angel in this long-awaited fourth film from Quentin Tarantino. Intense gory martial arts action rules the roost here.
Crime boss O'Ren-Ishii (Liu) paces the gallery of the House Of Blue Leaves, watching her subordinates take on The Bride (Thurman), a samurai-sword wielding blonde dressed in a natty, blood-stained yellow tracksuit. As The Bride disembowels and decapitates a dozen yakuza flunkies, pausing only to rip out the eye of one assailant to uncork another plume of blood, one wonders: what does all this mean for feminism?
The Story
The Bride is after vengeance. After taking a beating at the hands of her former colleagues from the The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, the final bullet to her head is delivered by Bill, who also happens to be father of the unborn child. Waking from a four-year long coma, the Bride clutches at her empty womb and unleashes a feral howl. It is a searing moment from Thurman, who showed up to work on the film only two months after giving birth. What does this say? Hard to say, except perhaps that hell hath no fury like a heavily pregnant woman gunned down on her wedding day.
The Good
The first volume of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill sees women stalk one another as remorselessly as Sergio Leone's nameless gunfighters. Men hardly get a look in. The face of the titular Bill is concealed from us throughout. In place of machismo, we have a ferocious femininity - the snarl of a mother protecting her child. A different strain of aggression drives this action movie, maternal yet predatory. Tarantino riffs on this with his opening fight where the Bride and Vernita Green (Fox) break off from their knife duel when Green's daughter returns from school. A self-conscious interweaving of numerous exploitation genres - in this volume, the influence of Japanese samurai movies and the ultra violence of Takeshi Miike (Ichi The Killer) are particularly strong - unfortunately one also thinks of McG's Charlie's Angels films. Superficially, at least. What with all these kick-ass chicks and Lucy Liu strutting her stuff. In fact, Kill Bill is the anti-Charlie's Angels. It is a deliberate riposte to the cartoon kung fu, lukewarm Matrix leftovers, and shoddy CGI - what Tarantino dismisses as all that "computer game bullshit" - that Hollywood has been dallying with while the director was away.
Where McG's franchise speeds you through its incompetence, Tarantino dawdles to shade in more characterisation, to fill in back story, to embellish every inch of the plot before marking it with a signature flourish. The director of the 90s is back and he might as well have signed the right hand corner of every frame. Tarantino pulls no punches, creating, as one critic put it, `The most violent film ever released by an American film distributor'. Squirting blood and flying limbs abound, but the director does it all with a breathtaking sense of style. We witness one sword-dance in silhouette, one in black and white, one over a beautifully filmed snow-covered Japanese garden, and even a sequence in Anime. `KB's story is minimal, but Tarantino's aim is style: Sergio Leone, Cheh Chang and Bruce Lee are all paid homage, and then gracefully outdone.
The soundtrack, primarily Japanese artists performing American styles, is haunting: Tarantino breaks form by not using well-known American classic rock (who could forget being `Stuck in the Middle' of Mr. Blonde and a helpless cop?), but by doing so sets the perfect mood of the film. They're songs we've never heard before, but feel strangely connected to. `Kill Bill' is a testament to Tarantino's ability to take the craft of his idols and make it his own, mixing classic cult film style and mixing it with his own wicked sense of Cool. Not for the faint of heart or anyone looking for a `feel-good' film, but `Kill Bill' is at the very least an instant classic.
The Bad
Unfortunately, he is so brimming with ideas and ambition that his film had to cut in two to meet the needs of distributors. Miramax took this course of action rather than edit their one-time wunderkind. An unsympathetic studio might have trimmed the extended anime sequence about O'Ren-Ishii's troubled childhood, for example, although this is an intense treat depicting events almost too agonizing and heartbreaking to witness in live action.
One aspect of this movie that puzzles me is the emphasis it's critics make of the gore. For my part the gore was so outlandish it's hard for me to see how anyone could take it seriously, and that was part of the appeal. Buckets of blood spraying 15 feet in the air is so beyond the realm of reality how could you possibly take it seriously? For my part it was borderline comical and really brought out the flavor of the scenes, rather than being their focus. And regardless of what you think of Tarrentino as a director, the man is bar none the best at matching musical scores to a scene in the business.
Kill Bill arrives at a moment in mainstream movies - between the second and third Matrix films, before the final part of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, ahead of another bloated Harry Potter installment - where Hollywood is willing to test the bladder strength and patience of its audience like never before. Whether it is the fashion for director's cuts or DVD deleted scenes, it is a contemporary truism that art is best served if the excised portions are restored. With this spirit in mind, the dividing of Tarantino's epic into two volumes may be seen as a victory for integrity. However, cynics may suggest that numerous installments mean punters shelling out more times for the same film, both in the cinemas and again for the various extended DVD editions. Whichever way you want to slice it, this is only half a film. Though it contains many pleasures - and it's great to see such an influential director returning with such a stylistically exuberant work - it is missing the classic satisfying element of any story: an ending.
The Point is... (Rating | 8/10)
A blood-stained love letter to exploitation movies that seems to be missing a few pages.
However, you must watch the movie at least for the following scenes :
1) The scene where Oren and the Crazy 88 enter the House of the Blue Leaves. Absolutely magical. The score, the pacing, the atmosphere....simply magnificent. The slow motion pull away and the obvious hierarchy of characters, Lucy Liu was absolutely made for that part and that part was made for that scene. The beautiful and menacing Gogo Yubari and the goofy 88s trailing behind. You can also feel the tension the owners feel at having such esteemed guests but one's who admittedly exude as much fear as they do respect. Add to this the nameless, faceless people dancing who are oblivious to the regality (and lethality) of Oren's entourage.
2) Oren is called out by Kiddo who subsequently whacks off Sophie's arm in a highly symbolic gesture. Words can't describe how moving that scene is. The score is superb and the timing is nothing short of perfect. I especially love the way the crowd pauses after the arm slicing...like they're all stunned or still convincing themselves it really happened...then all rush out screaming. Kiddo makes a slow, deliberate plod through the panicked crowd, a march to destiny filmed from several perspectives that combine holistically to give the segment a life of it's own.
yours truly,
Ar'Nath
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