Interesting, but dragged out unnecessarily

Rating: 7/10 (24 September 2006)

This movie appears to be a backhanded slap at kung fu movies dating back to the '70's. Certainly a movie with a title like "Kill Bill" is not meant to be taken seriously, but then the flick turns around and has large supplies of blood, gore, and mangled corpses.
It's the old story of a woman scorned, but this woman happens to be a Rambo/Governator/Bruce Lee/Jackie Chan/etc type of invincible killing machine (she even dresses in one scene exactly like Bruce Lee did in one his movies). Uma Thurman is appropriately vicious, then emotional in her Jekyl/Hyde style role. She exudes blind hatred and destructive fury one moment, tearful sentimentality the next. Some of these characterizations are played too straight for The Bride, others are over the top. This clumsy lack of consistency disorients the viewer. Are you supposed to fear her? Sympathize with her? Laugh at her campy and overstated persona? There's a lot of one-liner banter between the Bride and her adversaries, and some are quite funny. Having two people who are in a life-and-death struggle mocking each other is an old cliché, ripe for satire, but it's done way too much. It gets old after a while.
As the title implies, she's trying to exact revenge on the twisted sicko Bill (David Carradine doing the evil psycho well), her former lover, who is a trained assassin like herself. What he had done to her is one of the many contrivances of the film, but it's easy to overlook these and give the film whatever suspension of disbelief it asks of you. The action is uncompromisingly violent. Antagonists are portrayed as mindless, cold hearted killers.
Heads are chopped off. Innocents are blasted mercilessly. Body parts get cut off, sometimes pulled off, and mangled. This movie is not for everyone, especially if you dislike "dark" humor or relentless violence. Many fight scenes, although magnificently choreographed, drag on way too long, the reason this movie needed "two volumes." There are many scenes where the director stretches out two-minutes-worth of information into a 15-minute scene. The two volumes are usually shown back-to-back, so if you've got 4 hours plus commercial time with nothing better to do, this wild mayhem isn't a bad way to spend the time.