The cold, brilliant recipe that is Kill Bill

Rating: 8/10 (27 October 2006)

Revenge is a dish best served cold, after all.
For the recipe that is Kill Bill, consider Quentin Tarantino as a multi-million dollar blender who mixes the best of styles in his deep pool of talent: take Hong Kong action, Bruce Lee movies, nostalgic 1980's ninja movies and mainstream highlights, pour them into the blender and sprinkle the product with Tarantino's own trademarks and rapid-fire dialogue. Also pepper with film with homages and references. Finally coat the film in a rich glaze of adrenaline-pumping, decadently gory and heartstopping kinetics. Oh yeah, and serve with a killer soundtrack. Cold.
Needless to say, style alone cannot carry a film  no matter how sprawling with flair and fury it is. Kill Bill therefore tells the compelling story of one woman's revenge against her former assassin-colleagues who, on the day of her wedding, marched into the church and killed everyone there, including the bride's fiancée and her unborn baby. However they botched their way through their most important task: killing the bride. Now she wakes up from a coma four years later with one thing on her mind: killing Bill and the deadly viper squad who did this to her. 'Kill Bill vol. 1' thus tells the first half of the Bride's long, bloody, brutal and heartfelt journey for justice as she seeks out her enemies in parts of the world.
First let me say that this is my favourite Quentin Tarantino film, simply because it is a perfect amalgam of everything I like in both style and substance. The colourful format mixed with black-and-white visuals, the brief anime sequences, the chapter format, the atmospheric and eerie soundtrack and finally the fantastic story of cold, calculating vengeance  none of these components work on their own in the sense that their sole inclusion could support a film  but Quentin stirs and melts them together with with a bafflingly good skill that completely floored by non-existent expectations. On top of this, he applies an incredible kinetic energy to every part of 'Kill Bill' which makes the occasional slow-paced and introspective pauses all the more poignant.
The whole film is due to the aforementioned poised on the brink of overkill. It needs to be said. Ideas and visuals are bottled up under a lid but bubbling to come up at all times. It is enjoyable madness. However 'Kill Bill vol. 1' is not devoid of faults. These are no overriding or fatal shortcomings, but rather a small collection of scenes that simply do not work. The detective scene with Michael and James Parks going into the El Paso church after the massacre is incongruous and redundant, serving little more purpose than to give Tarantino's long-time friends their token cameos. Another scene that does not work for me is the dialogue-driven piece between Thurman and Fox in the kitchen after they've got their bitches on in a world-class cat-fight in the beginning. Their conversation feels staged, long-winded and purposely plot-propelling not to mention far too formal given the context and the histories of the two characters.
But indeed these are minor slip-ups and with the amount of good weapons in Tarantino's directorial arsenal, one can hardly hold it against him. Even the uneven pacing of 'Kill Bill vol. 1' is immediately forgiven when he plunges into to spinning martial arts violence and homaging goodies, all filtered through his own creative (...and sick) mind. Enjoy the coldly served dish.
8 out of 10