Homage Collage with Visual Extravaganza

Rating: 8/10 (23 October 2003)

As a homage collage with visual extravaganza, Kill Bill drives both die-hard cinephiles' brains and average filmgoers' adrenalins. Naturally it is gaining both critical acclaims and commercial success.

There are some sore points in the screenplay. Many QT fans must be disappointed to find no witty dialogues, which have hugely contributed to Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. This makes me wonder how much the dialogues in those earlier masterpieces relied on QT's ex-cowriter, Roger Avary. Also, his signature non-linear story structure seems meaningless this time. Obviously to build a climax, the less-engaged homage-to-blaxploitation chapter has to precede the highly-engaged homage-to-samurai-flick chapter in the film's timeline. It is pointless, however, to flip the revenge order in the protagonist Black Mamba's timeline; it is unnecessary for her to go to Japan first. If the reason is homage to non-linearly structured films including his own earlier works, I would call it autointoxication.
Conceptually Kill Bill is a film adaptation of American Pop Art, whose main focus is how to display sampled materials in new contexts. While it has been QT's significant weapon throughout his filmmaking career, he limitlessly enhanced this technique and almost exclusively used it to paint this extremely colorful picture. The film's uniqueness along with the director's well-known perfectionism had guaranteed its success even before the preproduction phase. Then, as expected, he left no flaws at least in the visuals qualities, overseeing cinematography, art direction, and costumes. In other words, Kill Bill was comparatively less challenging to QT; he just precisely executed what he knew and what he could. As he may not want to repeat this one-and-only collage piece, the next several films will test his real value as a director.