Too much and not enough

Rating: 6/10 (15 October 2003)

Kill Bill is a strange mixture of styles that is inconsistently entertaining. Roger Ebert once said "few movies have as many good scenes as Pulp Fiction." I would say that few movies have as many good AND bad scenes as Kill Bill.
I liked a lot of things in this movie. Several scenes were very well done, including the bar scene with the master sword maker and the reluctant saki maker, the fight with the ball-and-chain-wielding schoolgirl, and the anime flashback of O-Ren's childhood.
The problem with the good scenes is they aren't supported by any of the other scenes in the movie. I would have appreciated some stylistic consistency. The strength of Tarantino's earlier movies is that they never lost sight of the progression of the story or the development of the characters. In Kill Bill, I felt like each scene existed in its own world. There wasn't even a sense of rising tension towards the climactic scenes at the end. Things just happened one after the other as she crosses another enemy off her hit list.
Like many other people who have seen the movie, I felt that there was just too much in the movie. One extended plane scene would have been enough. Many fight scenes towards the end drag on and on as Black Mamba chops up guard after guard when we really want to see the big guys fight it out. Also, too much of the action is focused on swordplay. With the exception of one or two fights, there is none of the energy and movement of other movies in the genre that I really enjoyed such as Enter the Dragon or Legend of Drunken Master.