Caricature does not equal character

Rating: 4/10 (11 October 2003)

*** Spoilers within *** The sense that seeing Kill Bill left me with is that Quentin Tarantino is really trying. He is trying hard, wanting to bring us back to where we were after having seen Pulp Fiction for the first time. He does not succeed.

Successful comic books (and this is what Kill Bill aspires to be) have something at the core and that is characters that no matter how over the top, or unbelievable or both, succeed in producing either a sense of sympathy (for the heroes) or disdain (for the villains) or as is the case in the best comic books, for an example Punisher, sympathy for a main character that is really no better than the villains.
The problem with Kill Bill is that QT never manages to develop the characters from being more than stylized caricatures. So we are supposed to feel sorry for 'The Bride'? She conjures nothing more than indifference and perhaps a bit of boredom. And Lucy Liu as the main villain? QT seems more interested in having her in either extreme closeups or viewed in swirling camera angles surrounded by falling snow where we can really get a good view of her rather than at least minimally develop her character.

Besides the flawed or rather inexistent character development, another aspect of the movie that really bothered me was the pacing. In many of the scenes and especially in the last showdown between Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu the fighting characters will inexplicably pause and look at eachother for what seem to be an eternity before, after exchanging a few words, go at it again. I don't know if these pauses were put in there to build the 'mood' or add 'suspense' or simply to let us admire Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu posing in Ninja positions. This technique coupled with the constant breaks to the 'Chapter X' cut scenes leaves the movie feeling choppy and fragmented.

So what is good about the movie? Uma Thurman does a great job with what she has to work with. The styling is slick but far from enough to save the movie.
You know how it is when you go to see a movie that has looked pretty darn good in the trailer and afterwards you wish they would have made it a short, about the length of the trailer because it contained was pretty much all the movie had to offer. Kill Bill is not quite that bad but it is not that much better either.
Lucy Liu, who I admire otherwise, was surprisingly unconvincing as the villain. I have always thought of Lucy to have an edge to her but in Kill Bill she comes across about as lethal as a pre-school teacher, even when chopping off people's heads, and how they managed to accomplish that I can't for my life figure out.
In conclusion, QT has gotten to the point where he wants to be Quentin Tarantino so bad he is overdoing it. Kill Bill has the style and some of the techniques that made Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs so effective but it has nothing, nada, zipp, zilch of the multi dimensional characters and dialog that made those movies great.