Designer violence festival from the bucket-of-blood school of film making.

Rating: 6/10 (1 October 2005)

A woman - with a past in a cartoon style assignation squad - is left for dead on her wedding day and vows the path of bloody revenge.
The thing that hard-line critics and hard-line lovers of this movie both agree on is there is no real story here and - more bizarrely - little of the Ping-Pong dialogue that the director (Quentin Tarantino) made his name with. Maybe the fact that the movie was sliced in half is part of the problem - until I actually see Part II I will have to reserve judgement.
To date QT has made one great movie (Pulp Fiction); a very good movie (Reservoir Dogs); and a very average movie (Jackie Brown.) You can see the direction this paragraph is going already - because this is below average. Hong Kong Fuey was made on the cheap for an initial audience that didn't have the education or the appetite for much thinking - why celebrate it on a big budget? What is that all about? It is like filming a hardcore porn film with the budget of the movie Titanic!
(There is a movie called "I Spit On Your Grave" that was about an abused woman taking revenge on her abusers. Chicago Times'es Roger Ebert thought it was the worst movie he had ever seen (it is dreadful true). This has pretty much the same plot, but has more killing, blood and sadism - but he gives it top marks. Confused? I certainly am!)
Lead Uma Thurman - here called only The Bride - confuses me as an actress and a person (married/divorced/married/children/divorced all before 30) and is a little strange looking with her model legs ending with massive policeman's feet. Yes she can act a bit, but like Lauren Bacall (who she most resembles) if the script is bad so is she and vice versa.
UT is the best thing in this, although I don't believe her for one second.When you carry a fully grown guy on the end of a sword (as if!) wouldn't it buckle your knees a bit darling?
Tarantino is in love with her in the classic Hitchcock mode and fashion. He knows he is too ugly and dorky to get in to her pants through natural means so he uses the casting couch and excuse-to-be-with approach. Well done, but it is all a big lie and we both know it. Given her fast turn over record on men there isn't much future in it either.
QT fails because he is tasteless and doesn't have a natural censor to call upon. More is often less. He oversteps the mark and loses control on most films he makes and here he gets plain silly. There is no other word for it. We linger on a woman squirting blood from a severed arm - but we linger for no reason other than to give the audience a cheap thrill and the less said about the "comedy" rape the better.
There is a lot of sword fighting and severed limbs in this movie - so much so that you are sick to death of it before our semi-climax (we only get to the half way point, remember!), which is more of the same only bigger.
Like having a three course meal made up of the same dishes over and over again.
Tarantino is smart in knowing how to fit music to scenes (often obscure pop) and how this lets us linger for little reason on people doing nothing much more than walking down a corridor. He is a good introducer and while avoiding some clichés he celebrates others. Hong Kong cinema can do no wrong in his eyes.
To his credit he has not repeated himself in any of his efforts but this is an experiment gone wrong and the high marks and good reviews shows that more people are closet sadists than I would have imagined. Maybe that is too harsh a term, it is more like the scene in the school playground when the school bully is beating the living crap out of someone and everyone is circling round thinking it is great and urging them on because it isn't them on the receiving end. Tarantino makes you one of those people - and I don't like it.