director/screenwriter
Quentin Tarantino
producers
Lawrence Bender
Quentin Tarantino
cinematographer
Robert Richardson
music
The RZA
editor
Sally Menke
cast
Uma Thurman (The Bride)
Lucy Liu (O-Ren Ishii)
Vivica A. Fox (Vernita Green)
David Carradine (Bill)*
Daryl Hannah (Elle
Driver)
Michael Madsen (Budd)
Gordon Liu (Johnny Mo)
Chiaki Kuriyama (Go-Go Yubari)
Sonny Chiba (Hattori Hanzo)
Julie Dreyfus (Sofie Fatale)
* Heard, but not quite seen,
in this first volume.
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 111m
u.s.
release: 10/10/03
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other quentin
tarantino films
reviewed on this website:
- jackie
brown
- kill
bill - vol. 2
- pulp
fiction
- reservoir
dogs
- true
romance (script
only)
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Forget what you've heard, the
good and the bad: Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill - Vol. 1,
the geek master's first movie in six years (Vol.
2 arrives in February), neither reinvents the cinematic
wheel nor reveals its author at a low point. It's not a great
movie -- not the great movie Pulp
Fiction was -- but it's great fun. Tarantino has
assembled an adoring remix of everything he's ever loved in movies
on the theme of revenge: some spaghetti Westerns here (ever seen
1967's God Forgives, I Don't? You can bet QT has), some
Asian standards there, mixed in with Truffaut (whose The Bride
Wore Black informs Kill Bill more than a little) and
nasty X-rated Swedish exploitation (They Call Her One-Eye,
an influence on the heroine and one of her betrayers).
I would've loved to have seen it all in one mammoth, glorious,
three-hour-plus gulp (Miramax, imitating the heroine at the House
of Blue Leaves, cleaved the film into two parts); as it is, February
can't get here fast enough.
Trembling and bloodied, Uma
Thurman's Bride (known by no other name in this volume; her real
name is bleeped three times) chokes out four last words before
Bill (David Carradine), the eponymous focus of her vengeance,
blows her brains out. Well, almost. That's the first shot of
the movie, and we learn that the bullet knocked her into a four-year
coma. She escapes an aborted bedside murder attempt by Elle Driver
(Daryl Hannah, cold and mean as a knife here), one of Bill's
minions. "Don't you ever wake up," Elle snarls,
but eventually the Bride does snap out of it; you know this is
an exploitation picture because she has to kill two loutish rapists
within five minutes of her resurrection. Willing her coma-stiffened
legs to function, the Bride takes off, Death List in hand, and
sets about her course of action: slashing through each of her
former cohorts on Bill's Deadly Viper Assassination Squad --
including Elle, the domesticized Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox),
and the fearsome O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) -- before tracking down
Bill.
Thurman spends most of her
screen time seething with scarcely repressed homicidal rage,
though she's got a cheerier moment here when she poses as a bubbly
American tourist who just happens to have stumbled into the sushi
bar of retired-and-in-hiding master swordsman Hattori Hanzo (Sonny
Chiba, whose name Tarantino can now cross off his list of Movie
Gods I Want to Put in My Movie). Hanzo fashions the Bride a sword
sharp enough, one imagines, to slice the thoughts of air molecules.
It slices, all right; in the designed-to-be-legendary Showdown
at the House of Blue Leaves, it drenches the floor, ceiling,
and walls in hissing, gushing arterial spray as the Bride carves
her way through O-Ren's cadre of assassins (the Crazy 88s) as
though they were soft ice cream.
Kill Bill is a temple of worship -- a devout
hymn of praise to crap cinema (which isn't always crappy). Tarantino,
a generous filmmaker if ever there was one, pelts us with stylistic
jabs as well as flying body parts. O-Ren's origin story, for
instance, is told as a spectacularly gory anime cartoon,
and that's pretty much what you're watching all along. The movie,
though, retains Tarantino's preference for long breezes of rhetoric
(though shortened somewhat and honed to a point here -- most
of the wordiness here is on the part of those hoping to avoid
the Bride's wrath) as well as quiet, still moments. Tarantino,
who's seen everything and knows how it works, isn't trying to
subvert anything this time out. His goal, it's clear, is to make
the ultimate revenge movie with the ultimate sword
battle scene.
The latter might well occur
in Vol. 1, but never fear, more impressive stuff is on
tap for Vol. 2 (from what I remember of the script, which,
like many, I've read online). Tarantino ends this first part
with a line from Bill obviously intended to get people to come
back in February (effectively giving away a surprise that had
originally been saved for the saga's last act), but it's hardly
necessary. You want to see what happens next with the Bride --
not whether she gets her revenge, but how, and what toll
it may take on enemies and innocents alike. I'll miss Lucy Liu
as O-Ren, smugly cocooned in her stature and acumen, and Chiaki
Kuriyama as O-Ren's psychotic bodyguard Go-Go Yubari; but we
have more Daryl Hannah coming up, and more Michael Madsen (barely
glimpsed here) as Budd, the team's only male Viper; and we'll
get to meet Bill and see for ourselves whether we -- and the
Bride -- still want him dead.
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