Rating of
3.5/4
Blood and Loathing
Pie - wrote on 08/31/07
Tarantino did not make this film; he ripped and borrowed every B-movie plot-line and action scene available, mutated it in his own way, added a pinch of wit, a slap of style, and came up with gold.
The scene is set: A small wedding chapel in Texas; a pregnant, blood-spattered bride (what else?); a typically over-the-top assassination squad, and to cap everything off; a bullet to her brain. We don't move on from there (though we learn she was in a coma for 4 years) - you have to give it to Tarantino for his love of non-linearity - and so we next meet said Bride (a sizzling Uma Thurman) beating seven shades out of the first member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (I did say they were OTT), a surprisingly charismatic Vivica Fox - though don't expect a one-sided fight; Fox gives as good as she gets, and puts in a, though brief, incredible performance as the now-surburbanized Vernita Green. From here, the movie goes international, from Okinawa to Tokyo, wherever the Bride going, a trail of blood following her as she tracks down no. 2 in her self-styled 'death list' - the names of all the bastards that ruined her wedding day.
This is a revenge movie. Despite the style that modern film budgets have afforded it, at heart and core, revenge is the prime-directive. So what does this mean for the movie? Does it have action? Of course. This film is full to the brim with some of the most outrageous, ultra-violent scenes probably ever recorded. Does it lack a credible script? Well, yes and no. Tarantino, like in Pulp Fiction, though definitely to a lesser degree, manages the same clever wit in the most seemingly unnecessary of places - however, in Kill Bill, he usually follows a gem of dialogue with some out-of-place and, well, B-movie-esque (he is tributing those movies, surely he didn't have to imitate them?) chatter. Nowhere better is this shown than after the afore-mentioned fight between the Bride and Green, the latter's daughter arriving home, and Green announcing a temporary truce in the form of, 'You want some coffee?' Then, in said coffee break, Thurman spits out a heavy-footed and extremely cliched lump of dialogue speaking of lack of sympathy or whatever. The problem is, it's hard to determine whether Tarantino is merely alluding to the '70s samurai movies that inspired him - in which case, the extreme and quite often opposite polarity of the script is heavy-handed at best - or whether he is mocking them.
But what this movie lacks in a constant script, it replaces ten-fold in style and guts. If Tarantino isn't dazzling you with random changes from technicolor to black-and-white, he's using silhouettes to brilliant effect, or he's spraying blood from the recently-amputated like some terribly sadistic red shower. And it's here of course when you can really tell that Tarantino is having a hell of a lot of fun. His greatest achievement in this film is that he's able to split and splice every minority genre he pleases and create a collage of such overwhelming absurdity, you'd be hard pressed to find someone not bowled over by the sheer magnitude of the production. And we have to remember, this is only Vol. 1.
Of course, there are always consequences when a director is let loose. Here, Tarantino's downfall is that he maybe over-indulged. This film's obsession with '70s grindhouse references is tolerable on its own - and sure, quite fun as a novelty - but when Tarantino begins to dump self-references throughout Kill Bill, one begins to get the slightest feeling of self-satisfaction.
Though what the undoubted lasting memory of Kill Bill will be, despite Tarantino's oft-clumsy script, is the effortless humanity contained within the characters. The Bride in particular - and it's here that Thurman really deserves credit - has shimmers of morality that complete catch you off guard. Her haunting scream when she awakes from her coma, childless; or her inability to kill Green in front of her daughter complete shatter the veneer of the tough, heartless killer. For those few seconds throughout the film, we are not simply watching a killer take revenge, but we are, in the most peculiar way, sympathizing with her mass homicide.
What Tarantino has made here is, regardless of small lapses of mediocrity, one of the craziest and most memorable films of the past decade, and for his ability to make such art out of every dumb retro movie he loved as a kid, he deserves to be applauded.
