Movie Review:

Kill Bill: Volume One

    Quentin Tarantino’s work is often excused as being an exercise in style, not in substance.   His most famous film, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, had style to spare, but all the hip dialogue in the world couldn’t totally overcome a plot that was at best simplistic and at worst just tiresome.

    But Pulp Fiction, for all its faults, at least knew what genre it wanted to be.  What genre that is exactly, I don’t know, but it was consistent.  Kill Bill, on the other hand, vacillates between a straight revenge drama in the tradition of the western and an excessively bloody homage to 1970s martial arts camp.  Some might say that the melding of the two genres is ingenious – but it is not so much a meld as a clumsy stapling, and as such feels nothing so much as schizophrenic.

    The Bride (Uma Thurman) was once a member of a group of assassins headed by the as-yet-faceless Bill (the Charlie’s-Angels-gone-bad vibe is a bit corny).  When she left to get married, her entire wedding party was gunned down, with Bill himself putting the bullet in her head.  He wasn’t quite successful, though, and she awakes from a four-year coma, ready to hunt down and kill everyone who betrayed her.

    That aspect of the story works, and it actually works really well.  In fact, if that were the only aspect to Kill Bill, it would probably be Tarantino’s best work to date.  Unfortunately, it’s not.  Enter the martial arts scenes, as the film flings limbs and gallons of blood in every direction.  Could these scenes have been done straight and fit in with the rest of the film?  Yes, they could have.  But then it wouldn’t have been homage!

    Tarantino is too busy glorifying the past to notice that he actually has an enjoyable film on his hands.  In addition to the various 1970s references, Tarantino makes reference to his own films, particularly Pulp Fiction’s time-swapping.   Did the end, chronologically, need to be at the beginning?  There doesn’t seem to be any real reason for it.  (Of course, there wasn’t any real reason for the switching in Pulp Fiction either – Tarantino does like his gimmicks.)

    Do all the references ruin the film?   Well, of course not – it would hardly be recognizable as a Tarantino film without them, anyway.  What does wound the film is all the blood, which just makes the violence – already largely, though not entirely, extraneous – look ridiculous.  Is this the point?  Perhaps.  I’m not a student of 1970s martial arts films as Tarantino seems to be.  Regardless, the grafting of the silly fight scenes into a plot that could easily have stood on its own does the film no favors.

    Say this for Tarantino – the man can still pick music.  Even if his dialogue doesn’t even begin to approach Pulp Fiction, even if the gallons of blood turn the potentially sublime into the ridiculous, even if “over-the-top” isn’t anywhere in his vocabulary, Tarantino can still set visuals to music like few others.  Of course, it’s not enough to balance out all he does wrong.

    Tarantino is his own worst enemy in Kill Bill – at least, he has been so far.  Without knowing how the film is going to end, it’s difficult to say exactly for what Tarantino should be blamed.

   Even if the second half dumps the gore, though, it won’t make up for the silliness of the first.  C+

Kill Bill: Volume One is a Miramax release.  Rated for strong bloody violence, language and some sexual content.