Shrill swill, nil skill, will still fill ill Kill Bill ...

Rating: 2/10 (18 February 2005)

((((SPOILERS)))) I am convinced that Quentin Tarantino, at some point in his charmed life, sold his soul to the devil. There is no other way to explain how someone with such limited talent, lack of vision, poor taste and apparent bloodlust can, not only find huge success in making movies, but earn an astonishing amount of critical praise as a genius. He turns out unmitigated junk like KILL BILL (Vol. 1 & 2), and the only possible, logical reason for it being embraced is that Satan has stepped in and worked the blackest of black magic. QT had better enjoy his success, because someday he may have to pay.
KILL BILL is a pop culture trash heap, celebrating cinema at it's worst. Tarantino regurgitates garbage, but because he can recreate trash with a degree of flare and an eye for the colorful visual, it is mistaken for art. KILL BILL lovingly weaves together elements of chop-socky epics, klutzy yet ponderous martial arts flicks, spaghetti westerns, third rate film noir, fourth rate horror films and other random bits of genre and exploitation films that most respectable critics would avoid like the plague and somehow this cluttered homage to junk cinema is seen as visionary.
What he is doing is nothing new; Spielberg and Lucas built their careers on reliving their childhood guilty pleasures with multimillion dollar budgets. And that is not to mention the glut of films that find their inspiration in the superficial world of comic books and TV series from the 1960s. Long gone are the days where classic literature, folk legends and mythology represent cultural touchstones for storytelling; now you'd be hard pressed to come across a Shakespearean quote, not when a reference to a Trix breakfast cereal commercial is deemed to be so much more insightful.
Playing verbal Trivial Pursuit with every other line of dialogue isn't necessarily a bad thing; it can add a touch of whimsy and a cultural context to a tale. But in Tarantino's exceedingly narrow view of the world, every thought, every quip is reduced to a pop culture reference. Yet, the overabundance of arcane trivia he shoehorns into his scripts doesn't have a punch. They're not there for social commentary or to even particularly define a character's social background, but to show off Tarantino's own knowledge of minutiae. No matter how skillful he is as a director (and I won't argue that he isn't a clever craftsman) or how blood soaked his scenes or obscenity laden his dialogue, Tarantino still comes off as the know-it-all class geek trying to prove how smart he is. The problem is that he is not dispensing knowledge, only parroting catchphrases and factoids. There is no original thought in a Tarantino film, just repackaged leftovers.
Not that his screenplays don't try to pretend to have depth. In KILL BILL, Tarantino supplies a batch of clichéd fortune cookie bromides, probably recycled from old movies just like his action scenes. These bits of canned wisdom come off as forced and phony as the pseudo-Biblical nonsense that Samuel L. Jackson babbles in PULP FICTION. Tarantino's fans, both in the audience and in the press, latch onto these superficial bits of pseudo-philosophy as they try to defend his films as being more than the lame, ugly, ultra-violent exploitations they are. This despite the obvious, that Tarantino glibly seems to approach his material with a hokey-jokey attitude. Tarantino gets it both ways: he gets to trivialize his violence by packaging it in glib humor, while his defenders try to justify the violence by claiming it is part of something with much deeper meaning. Either way, both avoid dealing with the reality that his films are extended wallows in sleazy, pointless, sadistic violence.
For the most part, KILL BILL is nothing more than just another slasher/serial killer flick. The only difference is that the stalking killer is supposed to have our sympathy. Uma Thurman's The Bride, a.k.a. Beatrice Kiddo, follows in the footsteps of Vincent Price in dozens of horror films as the wounded victim seeking vengeance for a past injustice. Thurman, alas, has none of the class of Price, just as KILL BILL has none of the wit, style or charm of his old AIP mini-epics. But if all one wants in a film is elaborate displays of over the top violence than Tarantino fills the bill, so to speak. Otherwise, eighty percent of the film is wasted celluloid.
It is not until the end that Tarantino gets to the point, the confrontation between Kiddo and Bill, her mentor, lover and adversary. We get a plot twist that actually gives a purpose to the rest of the film -- finally. The Bride and Bill have a confrontation like a perverse version of KRAMER VS. KRAMER and the complications that the film has vaguely hinted at become a genuinely compelling situation -- and something rare in Tarantino's limited world: real human interaction. But, having saturated his story with blood, gore and cynicism, it is hard to care. Tarantino wants us to have a warm and fuzzy feeling at the end, but having given us a heroine who, even before her campaign of revenge, was a cold-blooded, monstrous killer, why should we wish her a happily-ever-after ending. Rather than being ironic, the ending is depressing.
Sadder still than the dubious quality of Tarantino's shallow, overlong epic is that he has gained iconic status as the purveyor of sadistic chic and cold-blooded cool, an icon to be admired and imitated. The violence in his films are nothing compared to the violence he has inflicted on our pop culture.