MOVIE:
Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu
Quentin Tarantino
Martial Arts/Action
110 min.
An assassin (Uma Thurman) wakes from a coma to avenge an attack from her group's leader (David Carradine), battling foes (Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox) in the process.
Following the success of "Reservoir Dogs," "Pulp Fiction," and "Jackie Brown," "Kill Bill" is Quentin Tarantino's highly acclaimed and long-awaited fourth film.
Tarantino took so long, went so over-budget and gave it such a long running time that Miramax, the film's distributor, split the film into two volumes. It is marketed much the same way that "The Matrix" trilogy and "Back To the Future II" and "...III" were.
"Kill Bill: Vol. 1" continues the style that has made Tarantino a cult hero by including an excess of violence, a tumultuous amount of swearing and many flashbacks and fast-forwards. However, as Tarantino tries to follows his canon of success, his passion for Hong Kong action movies and Japanese Samurai serials make this film rather over-the-top.
Uma Thurman is The Bride (she is never named in the movie), part of an elite assassination squad, the Deadly Viper Assassins Squad (Divas). Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), O-ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah) and Budd (Michael Madsen), make up the rest of the Divas, who all work for Bill (David Carradine).
The Bride decides to leave the group, get married - hence, the bride - and settle down. As a result Bill decides to kill her. The Bride withstands a ruthless beating and takes a bullet to the head, but instead of dying, she falls into a coma. The Bride wakes up four years later and prepares to serve a cold dish of revenge to her attackers.
The movie begins with a promising black and white scene, which sets up the audience for the whole movie. The pregnant Bride is seen lying on the ground battered, bruised and bloody. Bill walks over her and puts a bullet in her head. The audience is treated to the ignition and projectile of a bullet from the loading chamber. The second before the Bride gets shot, she tries to tell Bill that the baby belongs to him, but his bullet interrupts her. Violent, sadistic and ironic, it is the typical Tarantino style as seen in his previous work. However, the movie rarely keeps up this high tempo.
The film speeds through with intense and complicated action scenes, yet at times struggles through agonizingly slow and boring periods. The main fight scenes, when the Bride fought Green in her suburban house and in Tokyo with Ishii and her subordinates, were so frenetic that a viewer's blink would have missed a jab, slice or stab.
The intensity of the action is then betrayed by the crawl of certain parts of the storyline. After awakening from her coma, the Bride escapes the hospital, still paralyzed from the waist down. Whole minutes pass by while she tries to snap out of her paralysis, trying to wiggle her big toe.
With legendary Yuen Wo-Ping as the action choreographer, the action that ensues is right out of any old Jet Li movie, "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" or even "The Matrix." Yet, this asset would be a liability to the "Kill Bill" films. The fancy and intricate fight scene in a showdown at a Tokyo restaurant proves too much kung-fu can be bad thing.
The Bride, decked in Bruce Lee's famous yellow jumpsuit, is seen jumping from the first floor to the second, leaping down from the second floor with the help of a flexible bamboo pole and flipping over people on a tiny wooden beam. Finally, to top it all off, the Bride takes on Ishii's gang, the Crazy 88s. This scene is not unlike "The Matrix: Reloaded" when Neo fights multiple Agent Smiths. The Bride, a one-woman-army, single handedly massacres 88 Japanese sword-wielding gangsters, which is rather irrational and unbelievable.
The delightful animated introduction of the history of O-ren Ishii starts to make up for the superfluous action. The comic interface is similar to that of the Animatrix series, which shows the past of the Japanese-Chinese-Asian-American Ishii. This addition of a comic-interface further accentuates the Japanese element in the movie. The action and violence in this segment is fierce as faces get smashed with blows and heads explode with a single bullet. In this scene, the violence and action is believable. Exaggeration is part and parcel of animation.
Apparently Tarantino sees the human body as fruit punch encased in a sheath of flesh; the dismemberment of a limb always leads to a gratuitous downpour of blood. The audience is spared the vivid and disgusting spilled red blood when the film changes into black and white during certain intervals. Once the scene regains color, the movie assaults the visual senses with more gore and guts.
"Kill Bill" starts off well and ends off on a same violent, sadistic and ironic note. Certain fight scenes and an often-sluggish story pace disappoint. It is like "Die Hard" meets a Rob Zombie film in the presence of Quentin Tarantino. It is another movie for Tarantino's fans to enjoy, but audiences unfamiliar with Tarantino's movies may not like the brilliant and yet under-achieving director's newest work.
Photo: Breadchastick / Wikimedia Commons
