Review of this film's madness

Rating: 10/10 (9 October 2003)

(warning- this review includes speculative comments about the director's sanity that are intended to be humorous exaggerations. This critic actually knows nothing about diagnosing any mental inbalance.)
What can I say about Kill Bill Vol. I that hasn't already been said by hellacious hallucinations of a blood-soaked hobits dancing outside our windows late at night? For starters, it took everything that we thought we knew about what a movie is (which used to be something along the lines of a 2 hour visual narrative) and slam-dunked it into a small hoop that is hanging up on the door that separates insanity from hundreds of gallons of fake blood. Let me first get one thing out of the way to either entice or warn you off, depending upon what tickles you fancy: this movie is violent. It's easily Quentin's most violent work to date, and considering the fact that his movies are generally as violent as it gets, I'd say this movie hits close to being the most violent film of all time. Unfortunately, in my infant hours of having seen Kill Bill, that is really the only thing about the movie that I can be sure of. So if you're waiting for me to tell you what the movie was like, apart from the extreme violence, you'll have to settle for whatever descriptions can escape this speechless critic's brain. A decent jumping off point would be try to imagine Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon meets Army of Darkness and you have a small picture of what this movie is like. I, for one, have never seen ANYTHING like Kill Bill. Not in the movies. Not ANYWHERE. It doesn't even resemble a movie in any sense that we're familiar with. It's more like a 2-hour collection of footage depicting the revenge agenda of an un-named Uma Thurman character who has gone through hell, and will gladly go through more hell just to collect her vengeance. That essentially sums up the plot in its absolute entirety. Uma Thurman basically is on a mission for revenge and kills everything she sees. That's really all that happens in the movie. A great deal of the film is exposition, and the back story is pounded so well into us that even we are itching for Bill (whoever he is) to taste the wrathful vengeance of Uma Thurman (whoever she is). All things considered, there is really nothing for us to work with apart from our crash course in revenge seeking, dazzling visual texture, and half-hour fight scenes. Some might argue that this movie is nothing more than eye-candy, giving us a long awaited taste of the interesting things that Quentin does with the camera. Whether or not this is true, nobody can deny that--if nothing else--Tarantino is the most interesting director of our time as far as seeing how his movies will look on the screen. His style is so independent of convention that, if I had never heard of Quentin Tarantino, I would be pretty sure after seeing Kill Bill that he has never SEEN a single movie in his life. Unfortunately, we happen to know that he is an accomplished filmmaker, which means that the only explanation for Kill Bill's madness would have to lie within the apparent madness of its maestro. And this movie is so bizarre, that if I (and I happen to be a huge 'tino fan) saw Quentin Tarantino on the street, I would avoid eye contact and try to walk in the other direction without calling attention to myself. Because he's not sane. And anybody who thinks otherwise needs to sit down and watch Kill Bill, and remind themselves that the art came from within the mind of the artist.
If you're upset because this review didn't help you much with deciding weather or not you want to go see this movie, I apologize fully and offer the following question: do you think you can handle it? Because if you're going to see this movie, you have to be ready to take lots of things with a grain of salt. If you're a film student, or consider yourself a film buff, this movie is absolutely mandatory. I, for one, found myself desperately not wanting this movie to end. Kill Bill was entertaining, and without question, the most interesting experience I've ever had at a movie theatre. Good Luck.