Overrated, but fun.

Rating: 1/10 (14 April 2004)

Yeah, so last night I saw Kill Bill, Volume 1 for the first time. I just don't know.

As far as mindless fun goes, Kill Bill is entertaining. It is fun to watch. And yet, I can't help but feel disappointed and cheated. This movie doesn't live up to the expectations set by Quentin Tarantino's past work. Nor does is it deserving of all the critical acclaim that it has garnered. As I write this, Kill Bill Volume 1 is #90 on the user-voted IMDB.com Top 250 Films list. Kill Bill is certainly not one of the best 250 films ever made.
Kill Bill is very lacking in plot, to the point where it's insulting. Uma Thurman's character, The Bride, awakes from a coma and then kills two people and escapes from hospital room despite having severely atrophied muscles. She gets to the parking lot, where she sits in a stolen car for an indeterminate but decidedly exorbinant amount of time. Then there's an idiotic scene where she tries to urge her atrophied toe muscles to move by yelling at them. In a "brilliant" directorial decision by Mr. Tarantino, the camera then zooms in on her feet. Somehow she doesn't get arrested in all this time that she's sitting there. I guess she must have killed the only guy who worked at that hospital, since apparently no one called the cops on her. Equally questionable is her ability to travel at will despite having no discernable source of income and no ID. I'm sorry, but without ID, you're not purchasing airline tickets in post-9/11 America.
One of the biggest faults of the movie is that it is hard to empathize with The Bride. Yeah, her entire wedding party was killed and she was in a coma for 4 years. Maybe she deserved it. In Hard To Kill, you feel for Steven Seagal. You learn more about the two members of Bill's Deadly Viper Assassination Squad that The Bride kills than you do about her. In that regard, you empathize more with them, especially Lucy Liu's character.

Perhaps the most badly done part of the movie is the soundtrack. It is just terrible. In some scenes, there is an obnoxious siren effect when The Bride encounters danger. Almost every standout scene in the movie has pretty bad music. The first scene with Daryl Hannah's character stands out in this regard as well.
It's hard to understand Tarantino's goals with Kill Bill. The movie unquestionably draws from 1970s kung fu movies and 1980s action movies. But it's hard to tell whether the movie is paying tribute or merely a parody. The acting and the dialogue are both pretty abyssmal, but not hilariously so. None of the actors ham it up; in fact, they're all quite wooden which I guess their equivalent of attempting serious acting. Keanu Reeves looks like Shakespeare in comparison. The use of old school gore effects is also questionable. If you watch a 1970s movie using the spraying blood effect that Tarantino (over)uses in KB, it seems silly and trite. But if you watch an old movie using the same effect, when that effect was state of the art and the film quality was much grainier, you're able to reasonably suspend disbelief. The best way to pay tribute to old kung fu movies would be make a new movie that draws from them but brings them into the 21st century. Tarantino fails to do this. The only thing Tarantino has updated is the direction. And his frenetic flashy direction is a definite lowpoint of the movie. It's quite apparent that this movie was a labor of love for Tarantino, but his cinematography is quite detrimental to the movie. It was obviously meant to be artistic, but it comes off as pretenious, banal, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The movie plays like anime, and bad anime at that. Good anime develops a compelling in-depth plot involving complex relationships that justifies the excessive gore we are shown. The fact that anime is animated also makes ludicrous gore seem less funny. There's an inherent level of surreality in animation. Kill Bill lacks this.
As a whole, Kill Bill doesn't add up. The parts don't fit together well enough and something about the movie just feels disingenuous. As an action movie fan, I was let down. There is NOTHING about this movie that gives an edge over the movies it emulates. At best, Kill Bill stands on par with old school action movies, and I'm not convinced that it does that. There's a level of intensity present in a Rambo movie or an old Jackie Chan movie or a Lethal Weapon or a Schwarzenegger movie or even a good Seagal movie that just isn't there in Kill Bill.
Final Thoughts On Tarantino: Your first three films are classic. This is not. Stick with what you're good at.
Final Thoughts On Kill Bill: It's entertaining enough, but not better than what came before in any way, shape, or form. If you want a good post-coma revenge story, watch Hard To Kill. If you want copious violence, watch Commando or First Blood Part II. Those two movies are straightforward action romps devoid of the forced pretentions of Kill Bill. One good thing that Kill Bill does is that it doesn't intentionally pander to the popcorn crowd. Tarantino is definitely trying here, but he falls short.
Final Rating: 3.2 out 5 stars.
Slightly above average.