Overkill Bill

Rating: 7/10 (15 December 2003)

"Kill Bill", as we now all know "The Fourth Movie by Quentin Tarantino" is an over-the-top action spectacle that unfortunately doesn't really hit the mark. It's a decent attempt, but by no means a classic like "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction".
"Kill Bill" is undeniably still a Tarantino movie: the absurd characters, the absurd situations they get into, the pointless but very cool dialogs, the deliberately corny music (once again, chosen brilliantly) and all the things that made his other movies so great are still there, but they are used a lot more sparingly than they used to be.
Instead, everything takes a back seat to the action. Normally, I wouldn't mind this, since the action is usually also quite good in QT movies, but in this case it's just overkill..the first couple of blood fountains, decapitations and dismemberments are fun, but after that it just gets old very fast...many of the gore simply isn't shocking or entertaining enough to keep my attention. The fact that you don't really care about any of the characters dying doesn't really help either.
That being said, there are some truly great action scenes, like the fight between the Bride and Gogo the sadistic school girl, and some parts of the showdown with the dozens of masked yakuzas, but for every great scene, there's at least one that just drags on way too long or is just pointless.

"Kill Bill" is far from a terrible movie, since there are still enough flares of brilliance to make it quite entertaining, but there are too many times at which the action becomes boring/overkill/pointless, or the narrative become simply a bit boring. In the end, they should have probably just cut a lot of scenes from this movie and its follow-up and just combine them into a 2 hour movie.
**1/2 out of **** stars