This is not revenge.it's punishment!!

Rating: 10/10 (19 April 2004)

Spoiler Alert! Sorry, wrong movie. Anyway, after watching Kill Bill Volume I, Quentin Tarantino's latest smashing entrance into the otherwise relatively boring modern cineplexes, I've decided on a new paint job for my truck. And by that, of course, I mean I don't own a car OR a truck, but if I did I would certainly paint it every hideous color imaginable, including a phrase on the tailgate which would quickly and efficiently negate even the slightest possibility of ever obtaining exactly that which it describes.

The Shaggin' Wagon, as I'll refer to it for the benefit of all of you under-17 IMDb readers, is one of the first of almost two full hours of similarly hilarious images, words, scenes, characters, etc, brought to us by Quentin Tarantino, one of the most effectively humorous yet characteristically violent filmmakers working today. Tarantino has a surprisingly deep understanding of the gravity of violence but he combines that with the equal depth of his understanding of his audience. Hence, the violence in the movie is nothing like violence in real life (I'll explain this theoretical connection in a minute). People know this, especially his audience, which renders his films so effective.
Tarantino's understanding of his audience is one of the things that has allowed him to develop such a dedicated following, which I think transcends cult-status by its sheer size, if nothing else. Kill Bill has the curious distinction of being brutally and pretty much endlessly violent, and yet you can't really say that it's too violent, given that so much of the violence is so cartoonish (sometimes literally). I've heard that there was something like 100 gallons of fake blood used to make the movie. I can't remember if this refers to the total amount of blood used during filming or only that which ended up in the final cut, but animated blood, of which there are substantial amounts, are surely not included.
And either way, despite the massive amounts of violence in the movie, Tarantino's unique style of direction, his various cinematic experiments (such as flipping from color to black and white and back again, playing with lighting and color as in the fight scene on an entirely blue background where only the fighters' silhouettes were visible, and of course, the music), and probably mostly of all, his sense of humor tower above the film from beginning to end. One of my favorite tricks that he pulls with the music is in the fight scene between The Bride and O-Ren Ishii. It takes place in an exquisite Japanese garden, and just as the fighting begins the flamenco music kicks in, strikingly out of place but strangely effective. Tarantino's influence is so prevalent throughout the whole movie that not only can you sense his presence in just about every scene in the movie, you can almost see the look on his face.
It's important to keep in mind, however, that despite knowing how effective an unexpected mixture of violence and humor can be, Tarantino also realizes how effective real violence can be, and he knows how to make his violence effective, disturbing, even stomach-turning (see Reservoir Dogs). The part of the movie where The Bride wakes up in the hospital, for example, and realizes that she has lost her baby, is not funny at all. This is not meant to be amusing or funny, this is the scene where The Bride develops a large part of the rage that drives her for the rest of the film. If it was made a joke (and I can't really see how ever Tarantino could have made something like that even slightly amusing) the rest of the movie would have fallen flat.
The movie itself, when you think about it, is really little more than a set-up of deception and subsequent revenge. It's a pretty unusual set-up, in that the seeker of the revenge has a distinct advantage of the element of surprise, given that the people sought out for revenge shot her or saw her shot in the head, and so haven't even the slightest inclination that she might be alive, but the movie boils down to a decidedly simple and linear revenge plot. Tarantino knows this, too. You might have noticed that, first of all, The Bride carried with her a list in a little notebook of the people she means to kill (which reminded me, in a slightly different way, of the list that Steve Buscemi's character kept in his small part in Billy Madison), but also that, in keeping with his style, Tarantino plays with the chronology of his plot. He's known for this, but a movie that boils down to something as simple as this one does really can't do with a plot told in chronological order.
In her previous life (the one that contained something other than blinding rage and absolute determination for revenge), The Bride was a member of what is curiously called The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, the exact activities of which will not be clearly explained until Part II. Her code name was Black Mamba (although at one point I wondered why it wasn't Yellow-Haired Warrior), and her real name evidently entails something so secretive that it would be bleeped out when spoken in the movie.

Like most of Tarantino's movies, Kill Bill plays like a compilation of all of the things that he loves about a huge array of different kinds of movies, not the least of which, in this case, are martial arts movies and classic 70s exploitation films. The extensive homage to martial arts films plays no small part in the preceding storyline that results in The Bride being an expert with a sword. The weapons are, in fact, one of the more interesting parts of the movie, especially in a scene late in the film where she fights the teenage bodyguard of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), who fights her with a medieval mace and chain. I thought this was one of the best scenes in the movie, where this young girl - by using everything from her feet to her hands to her very neck to propel that mace at The Bride - proves that she is just about as good with that mace as The Bride is with the sword, if not better.
Keep your eye out for sneaky cinematic tricks that Tarantino pulls in his movies. Not necessarily things like animating a sequence that involves a little girl witnessing his parents' murders and then a pedophilia scene involving that same girl at the age of 11 (both of which would have earned the film an even harsher rating than the well-deserved R), but things like the fact that the outfit that The Bride wears is identical to the outfit that Bruce Lee wore in his last film. Or even better, Roger Ebert points out that that tune that Hannah was whistling as she walked through the halls of the hospital to provide her own bit of nursing to The Bride while she's stuck in a coma is the theme from the 1968 film Twisted Nerve. Clearly Tarantino once again placing an homage to an old favorite in one of his movies, but Ebert curiously notes that it is not meant to simply pay an homage, but to suggest that there are leaks between parallel universes in which movies reside. Pretty clever idea, if not entirely founded. On the other hand, Ebert also suggested that after Hattori Hanso made The Bride her sword (breaking an almost 30 year old pact he had made to never again create an instrument of death) his statement `This my finest sword. If in your journey you should encounter God, God will be cut' was not exactly his most modest hour, so he could also be completely off about the movie universes thing. Hanso was not bragging about how badass his sword was. He feared that God would be cut by Hanso's breaking his word. I was surprised Roger missed that one. God doesn't strike me as the kind of person to worry about getting cut by an angry woman with a sword. That's stuff for mere mortals to concern themselves with.