Stylish, energetic, and witty trash

Rating: 8/10 (5 November 2003)

The first thing you need to know about Kill Bill is that it's about as far removed from Tarantino's classic Pulp Fiction as you can get. Tarantino's calling card - cool criminal types who kill casually and shoot the breeze about pop culture from this and many other decades - is absent. And thank God. Returning to that formula, used to lovely effect in Fiction and 1992's Reservoir Dogs (and aped by just about every subsequent crime movie since), would have provoked audible winces from Kill Bill's audience, who have been anxiously awaiting the director's followup to 1997's mildly received Jackie Brown.
No, Mr. Tarantino has tired of that one trick, and as such can't be called a pony. He's looking in other directions, inhaling every piece of cinematic candy he can find and sifting through it all to find suitable inspiration. In this case, the inspiration is the classic kung-fu "chop-sockies" of the 1970s. Kill Bill is littered with sly references to these cult flicks, so it's safe to say that those cultists will get slightly more out of Kill Bill than the average moviegoer. But that doesn't mean the average moviegoer won't have fun with this trash. Because make no mistake: Kill Bill is trash, in its purest and most exhilerating form. Tarantino borrows, recycles, and improves on old garbage and turns it into....well, new garbage. The result? A cult classic in the making, and a breath of much-needed fresh air in this season's stale movie environment.
The second thing you need to know about Kill Bill is that the pace never slows down. You know you're in for a treat when the first major fight scene takes place less than 5 minutes after the opening credits. After that, it's a high-octane ride as the Bride (Uma Thurman) tries to track down the b**tard who crashed her wedding, killed everyone in attendance (including the groom and her unborn baby), and shot her in the head. She survived, though, and newly equipped with a metal plate in her head (and one hell of a bad mood), the Bride is out to kill Bill. See, Bill is the leader of a top-secret group called the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DVAS - they're divas, get it?). The entire Squad, along with Bill, busted up the wedding for an as-yet-unknown reason (hopefully Volume 2 will fill that particular hole). So the Bride decides to kill all of the DVAS, along with Bill. In case you couldn't tell by now, Kill Bill has "cult movie" written all over it.
And what a cult movie! Tarantino fills Kill Bill with knowing nods to martial arts classics, and manages to fuse them with his own pop-punk, ultraviolent sensibilities. The gore in this movie is deliciously overdone - you can practically see the hose spouting blood out of the decapitated yakuza's head, and that's to say nothing of the anime section detailing the childhood of one of the DVAS, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). The final climactic fight scene, which takes place in a gorgeous Tokyo restaurant, has more eye-popping choreography and virtuosic camera work than you likely thought possible. The whole thing is like Crouching Tiger on acid, with Uma and co. brazenly flaunting the rules of gravity while showing off some of fight supervisor Yuen Wo-Ping's best work to date. Kill Bill's dialogue is shamelessly cheesy, its characters are cartoons, and it's all overseen by the faceless Bill (David Carradine, from TV's Kung Fu, natch), whose weapon of choice is a katana that closely mirrors the one that the Bride uses to exact her revenge. A retired swordmaker (who Makes One Last Blade After Swearing He'd Never Make Another Weapon Again, cough cough cheese cheese), a p**sed-off bartender's assistant, a necrophilic male nurse (he's Buck, and he's here to f*ck), Nancy Sinatra, and El Paso all make their way into the Kill Bill mix. But what's most interesting about Kill Bill's atmosphere is the East-meets-West sentiment. For every slo-mo katana attack, there's a gunshot from a six-shooter. For every Oriental flute solo, there's a harmonica lick. For every masked yakuza gangster, there's a deputy decked out in a cowboy hat and leather boots. It's as if Tarantino is subliminally trying to get us (the West) to connect with them (the East), two cultures legendarily incompatible.
As it turns out, they're quite compatible after all, as Kill Bill has huge appeal for both hardcore Bruce Lee fanatics and the average blood-and-guts-loving Joe Schmoe. Kill Bill is a bracing, thrilling piece of pop-culture junk that no one over the age of 18 should miss out on.
Grade: B+