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Uma Thurman takes center stage as a samurai
sword-swinging assassin in Kill Bill--Vol. 1.
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Someone somewhere will faint while watching Kill Bill --Vol. 1. It might be the first scene where an attacker's arm is sliced off at the shoulder and the exposed stump explodes with a geyser of squirting blood. It might be the image of a pretty young woman missing the top of her head due to a swinging samurai sword. Audiences will gasp communally, but I guarantee they'll keep watching.
Kill Bill --Vol. 1, writer/director Quentin Tarantino's first new film in six years, is a cinema shocker with an Asian cult movie pedigree. No other studio movie this year comes close to its revolutionary use of violence and childlike, cartoon images. It's more a work of Asian pop art than a feature-length Hollywood movie, closer in spirit to Matthew Barney's avant-garde epic Cremaster III than Roberto Rodriguez's spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
Kill Bill has been touted as one of the most violent films of all time, an amusement park thrill ride with a body count, but its critics forget the puddles of blood are just watery jam.
Kill Bill is extreme and provocative, yet intentionally playful. Tarantino has taken what's considered an immature subject, '70's martial arts movies, and created an impressive, revolutionary film. Miramax, the film's financier, decided to release the three-hour film in two parts, and Kill Bill --Vol. 2 will follow in four months. We can hope the second film matches the artistry of its first installment.
Actress Uma Thurman takes center stage in a surprisingly simple plot about a ninja nicknamed Black Mamba (Thurman) who awakens from a coma after a bloody double-cross from her crime boss lover, Bill (David Carradine), and his team of killers, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS): California Mountain Snake, aka Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), Cottonmouth, aka O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Copperhead, aka Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) and Sidewinder (Michael Madsen). Black Mamba seeks revenge, and she'll travel the globe to gain justice against Bill and his goon squad.
Thurman has shown a knack for diverse roles in films like Dangerous Liaisons, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, where she played a mobster's wife. Thurman is believable as Black Mamba, and she looks impressive in her sleek brown and yellow tracksuit. She holds our attention whether she's swinging her samurai sword or not.
Carradine, who played Caine in the '70s TV series Kung Fu, stays in the shadows for most of the film, although his gravelly voice makes an impact.
Liu makes perfect use of her dainty appearance and cute girlish looks as O-Ren, the kimono-clad leader of the Tokyo crime syndicate. Her chief assassin, Go Go Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama), a young girl in a school uniform, completes the clever, fantasy package of killer women who are more vicious than the men.
Kill Bill is a series of action sequences tied together loosely by the simple revenge plot, but the action is truly operatic. Breakfast cereal scatters across the floor when Black Mamba confronts Green in the kitchen of her house in Pasadena, Calif.
Kill Bill climaxes with a Grand Guignol moment: 76 yakuza gangsters, O-Ren's bodyguards known as the Crazy 88s, are strewn around the atrium of The House of Blue Leaves, the Tokyo restaurant that serves as O-Ren's headquarters. Their hands, feet and arms cover the floor. The scene is bloody yet comical, chaotic but artistic.
O-Ren taunts her opponent: "Just another little Western girl playing at being a samurai" as Black Mamba fights her lead bodyguards Sofie Fatale (Julie Dreyfuss) and Go Go Yubari (Kuriyama) leading to final confrontation with O-Ren herself.
Kill Bill combines comedy, violence and absurd characters with contemporary Asian culture, its comic books (manga), animation (anime), music and fashion. The result is a movie that hums, alternately paying homage to old-school martial arts movies like Master of the Flying Guillotine and the ultra-violence found in contemporary Asian movies like Takishi Miike's Dead or Alive: Final.
Kill Bill is more than cinematic homage, and it's certainly not clumsy pastiche. Tarantino has made a bloody, sly, artful comic book, worlds apart from a highbrow drama like Gangs of New York and the socio-political depictions of violence shown in classic '70s dramas like The Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange. O-Ren-Ishi's young life and her ascent in the crime world is portrayed in Japanese manga-style animation. The film's thunderous '70s soundtrack, featuring its theme song, "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)," pours over the image of a woman's bloody face. Tarantino goes out of his way to re-create a movie-going experience from 1975, complete with a ShawScope graphic, split screen images and an intentionally scratchy film print.
At age 40, Tarantino is facing the middle stage of his career, but Kill Bill shows he's as still capable of making provocative movies today as when he first burst onto the movie scene.
Tarantino's debut film, the raw and visceral low-budget caper film Reservoir Dogs, inspired by the Hong Kong movie City on Fire, foreshadows the extreme action of Kill Bill.
Pulp Fiction was released two years later, and the dialogue and the rhythms of everyday speech remain a highlight of the film.
Tarantino's best film remains Jackie Brown (1997), a deliberately told crime drama with Robert Forster and '70s blaxploitation queen, Pam Grier. The best scenes in Jackie Brown involve Grier and Forster simply talking to one another, but such quaint romance has no place in Kill Bill, which is stripped to samurai speech.
Imagine the film where Tarantino expunges his core influences -- the noir, kung fu, blaxploitation movies he watched as a teenager -- and matches his narrative talents with serious, epic subject matter. That's something worth waiting to see, a movie closer in spirit to Jackie Brown. Until then, I'm thrilled with Kill Bill, a film destined for cult status like the Asian films it emulates. Personally, I can think of no better compliment. Grade: A-
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