Kill Bill Volume 1

Rating

Director

Quentin Tarantino

Screenplay

Quentin Tarantino

Length

111 min.

Starring

Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen, Michael Parks, Sonny Chiba, Chiaki Kuriyama, Julie Dreyfus

MPAA Rating

R (For strong bloody violence, language and some sexual content)

Review

A stylish farce on an epic scale, Kill Bill, Volume 1 is writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s fourth and most violent film.

The story is one meant for episodic television in the 1970s, perhaps something from the Blaxploitation era. Kill Bill is an attempt to blend Tarantino’s love for that decade with his fascination for the Japanese cinematic culture. Uma Thurman triumphs as Black Mamba, a former member of the Deadly Viper Assassin Squad, an elite group of deadly killers hired and trained by titular Bill (David Carradine). The film centers around Black Mamba’s desire to exact revenge on the five people who attempted to kill her, her baby and her entire wedding party four years earlier.

The film opens on Black Mamba being tormented by Bill, her former lover and father of her child, right before he decides to shoot her in the head. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily for eighty-percent of the characters in the film, his gunshot did not end her life. It just pissed her off. The film is told in chapter style, like the cinema serials of the 1920s and 1930s where the heroes, or in this case heroine, spent many episodes trying to succeed at some grand goal but getting there one small step at a time. The first chapter tells the second quarter of the story, namely the gruesome suburban housewife dual pitting Black Mamba against Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), codename Copperhead. Ruined in part in the film’s previews, we see them duke it out only to cease the hostilities when Green’s four-year-old daughter comes home from school. They stop briefly trying to convince her that nothing’s wrong and after she goes to her room, they step into the kitchen for a civil cup of coffee. This is the first scene where we see the beginnings of a pattern: each woman treats the other respect, a traditional Japanese sentiment. Honor above pride.

The second chapter tells the history of the first name Black Mamba crossed from her list, that of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), a.k.a. Cottonmouth. This is one of many unrealistic segments in the film that pull the audience away from the live-action format and put them into a different medium. Here, Tarantino switches to animation, an obvious homage to the popular anime style. This is the first substantive departure from reality and we enjoy seeing the gruesome life story of the woman who, we see in later in a live-action sequence, became head of the Japanese Yakuza by decapitating a crime Boss when he questioned her Chinese-American-Japanese heritage.

The film takes many bloody and unexpected turns in the classic Tarantino style. We find the movie an unapologetic B-movie wrapped in a glossy package filled with A-list actors. Kill Bill concludes with a twist, enticing the viewer into wanting to see the conclusion in Kill Bill, Volume 2 to be released around four months later.

Two of the five original killers end up dead by the end of the film and we assume we’ll see the other three die in the next film, including the deliciously evil Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver, codename California Mountain Snake, who becomes disgruntled when Bill refuses to let her kill Black Mamba in her sleep. The other character, a virtually unseen assassin named simply Budd, codename Sidewinder (Michael Madsen), is likely to be one of the last three victims. Then, of course, there’s the titular Bill who will certainly figure very prominently in Kill Bill, Volume 2.

The hard part about the film is that the characters don’t develop beyond the pages of the screenplay. They aren’t intended to be well-rounded individuals; they’re intended to be larger-than-life and ready to live that life until its bitter end. This will cause some members of the audience grief when they try to understand all of the motivating nuances. What they need to realize is that there is no intention here to be anymore than we see. Kill Bill exists as entertainment for entertainment’s sake and what storytelling elements it has are to serve as a tribute to all of the genres that have gone before it. Much like the theme of the characters in the film, it is not just to seek revenge but to do it with honor and dignity and show everyone what it’s made of.

To say Kill Bill is an artistic film is to pay it a great disservice. The film is more than artistic. It transcends art to a plane that few auteurs can achieve. Stanley Kubrick would be proud of the amorphous way this film creeps into your psyche. The movie embodies the soul of the red-blood American, a blood-thirsty soul that wants to see everything around him ripped to shreds and test the mettle of those he once called friends. It will certainly disturb some and delight others but the true mastery herein is not what it does or doesn’t do for the audience but what it does for film as an art form. It celebrates and eludes the common definition of film as art and redefines the way you look at movies.

Review Written

October 15, 2003