Lots of Style, Little Substance

Rating: 5/10 (8 February 2008)

In Kill Bill I, Quentin Tarantino continues his tradition of paying homage and simultaneously insulting every genre of film vaguely related to his projects. This time around, it's the Tarantino version of Fists of Fury or any of 1000 other martial arts films with lots of wire-work, people who become black-belts in a month or two because they are motivated by revenge (though they skip the part where they develop muscles) and cartoon-violence and gore.
Uma Thurmond plays a double-crossed and angry woman who was beaten to the point of death on her wedding day, along with her entire bridal party. Bill is her former employer and also the guy responsible. And her former work associates are the people she's out to kill.
Predictably, the characters are, at best, two dimensional, the violence is nicely filmed and almost never ridiculous-looking, and the gore is hilariously ridiculous and the script is as serious as the absurd predicaments it creates. A whole slew of ethnic stereotypes comprise the main characters, and Uma Thurmond's protagonist is a walking cliché about a woman scorned, Lucy Liu is a quintessential Asian- American, etc. Bill, of course, is lifted straight out of Charlie's Angels' Charlie - heard but never seen and yet all-powerful.
Despite their vacuousness and lack of any sort of depth, there is a certain post-modern catharsis in the silliness and elaborate and expensive production of Tarantino's essentially grade B- pulp films. If nothing else, they are entertaining in a blood-drenched but otherwise unchallenging way. Leave your brain somewhere else and enjoy.