The Tarantino touches were not suited to this movie.

Rating: 1/10 (18 September 2006)

This could have been a great movie if Quentin Tarantino had not directed. He really has no idea how to film martial arts scenes. (The second volume, which contains very little fighting, is terrific).
One reviewer on IMDb wrote that a good martial arts scene makes you wish it would keep going on. For instance, you could watch 3 hours of one continuous Jackie Chan fight scene and never get tired. I would add that another quality is that is stimulates the little, imaginative, childish nerve in all of us and makes us want to do martial arts. This movie had neither quality. The fight scenes were embarrassing--I was cringing, waiting for them to end. They looked ugly and absurd.
There was, however, some kind of strange, perverse beauty in how quickly the Bride could kill. Had Q.T. focused on that, he could have compressed this into about 20 minutes, and combined both movies. There was no real plot, and the dialogue was horrendous, so compression could only help.
Not only were the fight scenes choreographed badly, they were filmed badly as well. The battle with the crazy 88s: Too many people on the screen, poor camera work, and then Q.T. makes it even harder to see whats going on with stupid tricks, like going black and white.
An English professor of mine gave me some wise advice, saying "A good artist knows what to leave out." Too many things should have been left out because they had no point, and did not move the plot. For instance, the Bride sitting on airplanes and people driving places filmed in what I suppose was meant to be an "artsy" way added 20+ minutes to the film. When an artist indulges himself and not his audience, he insults his audience.