Tarantino becomes P.T. Barnum

Rating: 2/10 (23 October 2003)

****possible spoilers****
Depending on whom you talk to, Quentin Tarantino is either a great director paying homage to as many films and film genres he can dream up in his overextended forehead, or he is an unoriginal rip-off artist who's only claim to cinematic achievement is that he puts enough violent episodes in his films to please his blood-thirsty hard core fans and keep them forever loyal. With Kill Bill, he takes things a step further by paying homage not only to grindhouse, kung-fu and Samurai films, but also P.T. Barnum. In other words, Quent knows there's a sucker born every minute and most of them are his loyal fans.
I have seen four very bad films this year: It Runs In The Family, Bad Boys II, Basic and now Kill Bill. In Kill Bill we find out that Quent is so in love with his own directing style that he ended up totally disregarding the kind of film he was supposed to be making and instead uses his idea to try and prove how artsy and cool he still is to his adoring fans. What is saddest of all about the whole thing is he had a good idea here, but flubs it so badly trying to be super-cool that it ends up as one over-extended mass of carnage and bloodletting that seems to go on for eternity.
Tarantino claims this is his fourth film. He proudly proclaims it in the opening titles. What he does not proclaim proudly is that this is only the first half of his film as the words Volume I are once again almost hidden in the opening title (it appears very small as vol 1) just as it was done on the web site for the film in it the subsequent tv ads and theatrical trailers. So in actuality this is Tarantino's third and a half film, but you won't see that title card. I guess he's not as proud splitting the film as one would think and after viewing it, that's quite understandable but more about that later.
Tarantino again refuses to be bounded by any type of linear story telling. Normally, that would not be a problem with me but if any film cried out for straight-forward story telling this one did. After the opening scene of Bill putting The Bride into a coma for four years and after the credits roll, we immediately go to his first chapter which is a confrontation between The Bride and Copperhead (Vivica A Fox). After dispensing with Fox in front of Fox's daughter Uma departs in her vehicle and as she crosses off the Copperhead's name, we see she has already crossed off the name of O-ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). So at the beginning of the film we already know she has done away with one of her adversaries so when that battle does appear late in the first half of this film, any tension that might have been gained is completely destroyed in the first 16 minutes of the first half of Kill Bill. So much for non-linear story telling. Though he likes to spill blood, Tarantino obviously hates any kind of suspense (which might explain his recent put-down of Hitchcock). It gets worse.
From there we flashback to the church where Bill shot The Bride and where his assasins created havoc on her wedding party. After being found still alive by a sheriff and his deputies, we then get The Bride in the hospital lying in a coma. At this time we also get Elle Driver alias California Mountain Snake alias Daryl Hannah in a split screen dressing as a nurse, filling a syringe with poison supposedly to finish The Bride off. It is a mission we know beforehand won't succeed so when her cell phone rings and it's Bill telling her to call it off, the whole scene becomes incredibly pointless. It is here because Tarantino wants again to show us his coolness, storytelling be damned.
Soon we get more pointless Tarantino cool. After a silly bit in the hospital where The Bride wakes up from her coma and looking to be in as good of a condition as Ali Macgraw did on her deathbed in Love Story, so much so that she is able to immediately dispense with two silly perverts. Soon, she begins talking to her toes to get them to move. Here we get what is suppose to be a cool anime sequence, telling us the background of O-Ren Ishii who is already dead because we saw the name crossed out on The Bride's notebook, even if we haven't seen it on the screen yet. Since we know she is dead, and we are probably going to see how she was killed soon, the whole animated sequence (and not a very good one) becomes another pointless exercise in Tarantino's "Look at me I'm cool" disease. It's no wonder this film ran three hours. The rest of the first half of his film goes on and on in much the same vain - interminably so. Even when we near the four month intermission point we get The Bride just beginning to list her targets on her notepad, so in essence when we reach the end, we are back near the beginning again. More cool.
Then there is the big fight scene where before confronting 0-Ren (who we know is already dead), The Bride must dispense with about a hundred of her comrades including a teenage girl in a catholic type school uniform. What we get is a lot of severed limbs where everyone must have five times as much blood as the human body normally carries so Tarantino can spray it around the room like a gardener watering the lawn. A good portion of this fight is in black and white I suppose to spare us the horror of it all. It doesn't matter, black and white or living color, the whole bit is cartoonish and more comical than intense. The fact that Tarantino proclaimed it would be too intense and we would be unable to watch his full film in one sitting because of it is as ludicrous as the scene itself. It must be the P.T. Barnum in him working. If there had been some interesting swordplay, it might have been redeemable, but because it is more important to Tarantino to have his blood joke, you actually see very little of the fighting mostly due to some of the worse editing ever seen in this type of film. As if black and white weren't enough, shortly after we get the finish of the battle completely in shadows with the lights turned off. More Tarantino cool. More pointlessness.
When The Bride's fight with the already dead Lucy Liu does occur, our only curiosity is how she dispenses with her. The scene is beautifully photographed, but the battle itself is so quick and anticlimactic we can only stare at the screen and go HUH? Some decent one on one swordplay would have been nice here but I guess that doesn't fit in with Tarantino's scheme of putting as much blood out there as possible. So much for paying actual homage to Samurai films.
Tarantino could have done what he supposedly set out to do. Between this half of the film and the second half we'll get in February, there may have been enough to make an hour and a half or two hour film homage to the genre he claims to love. Unfortunately, his love of himself is becoming so overwhelming, his love of showing off his filmmaking coolness interferes too much with what this film could have been and should have been. Will his faithful followers ever be convinced that this is an overextended, two part self congratulatory two part rip off? Probably not, but Tarantino knows that. So did P.T. Barnum.