Disappointing, flawed, occasionally ludicrous martial arts homage/parody

Rating: 5/10 (19 October 2003)

Wow, what a major disappointment.
I bought the KILL BILL original soundtrack a few weeks back, played it once, and never played it again. Tarantino's OST choices are some of the best CDs I've ever heard; the KILL BILL one, while not terrible, was so forgettable and background-music-lite that I should have seen this as some kind of omen.

KILL BILL, the movie, in short, is actually pretty terrible.

I know what Quentin was attempting to do; I grew up watching the Asian martial arts flicks of the 1970s and early 1980s and I loved them. There was something incredibly satisfying about the incredible physical realism of seeing those guys strut their stuff; guys like Sonny Chiba, who features in KILL BILL, left an impression on me that will never be forgotten. Their all-around coolness, with martial artistry that topped anything you'd see from Hollywood, was a revelation.
However, I hated the wire work. I hated ninjas that could leap thirty feet vertically. I hated the fact that they possessed super-strength, and never seemed to tire. I hated the fact that, for some stupid, code-of-honour reason, the bad guys only ever fought the good guys one-on-one, despite overwhelming odds. And I hated the ridiculously over-the-top bloodwork.

Unfortunately, Tarantino, in his quest for the perfect homage, concluded that KILL BILL would have to feature all of these awful traits, and more. And for someone who has openly criticised THE MATRIX movies for their use of 'wire-fu', I thought it was pretty rich indeed that KILL BILL featured so much obvious use of wire-assistance.
The plot is simplicity itself; it's your basic revenge thriller. The Bride, played by Uma Thurman, wakes from a four-year coma to find herself not only less the child she was carrying, but at the receiving end of God-knows how many unwarranted sexual advances as her sure-thing, dormant body was leased out to hicks for a straight $75/throw. This obviously p**ses her off big time, but when we learn, through flashbacks, of the massacre of her husband-to-be, and entire party, at her wedding four years prior, well, she's really not very happy at all.
The killings were orchestrated by her former employer, Bill, leader of the much-feared Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, which includes O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah), Budd (Michael Madsen) and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox). At the wedding, the Bride is beaten severely, the final blow coming from a bullet straight into her head, at close range, from Bill. Her final words, "The baby is yours," before he pulls the trigger. Nice.
The Bride draws up her 'death list'; the five members of the Viper Squad that she will kill, leading up to Bill himself.
KILL BILL, like PULP FICTION before it, isn't told in sequence; it's not as clever as PULP, but the opening scene, for example, is actually the end of the movie time-wise. It works because you move straight into the action. And if action's your bag, then you're laughing baby. The film is pretty much non-stop action, bar a few necessary plot movements and pauses. And initially, you're grateful, because this is what you came to see. By the end of the flick, however, you're praying for it to move on. Like most films of this type, ultimately, the reason you came to see the movie is lost; fights blend into each other, and you find yourself checking your watch.

However, in other Tarantino movies, these endless battles would have been saved by the little slices of genius in between. This is so not the case in KILL BILL; for someone who has built his career on dialogue, some of the shite uttered by the cast in this flick has to be heard (or read - lots of subtitles) to be believed.
Mostly, it's the Japanese translations that fall totally flat. Sonny Chiba, for example, utters the immortal:
"I can tell you, with no ego, that this is my finest blade. If, on your journey, you should encounter God, God will be cut."
Hello? God is Jewish - of course he's cut! ;-)
As you have probably read, this is a very violent movie. Quentin got the film past the credits for three reasons: one, the blood and gore is so over-the-top that it cannot be taken seriously at all. It's cartoon violence. Two, the most disturbing scene of the movie, which traces O-Ren's history, is shown entirely in anime. Obviously, this was necessary because it features a young child, and includes the notion of paedophilia. However, the scene is so sleazy that it will leave a terrible taste in your mouth. Again, I know what he was doing, but anime is so awful, so ridiculously dated, that it just plain sucked. Finally, a concluding scene of the movie is shown entirely in black and white; this gets the critics past the most over-use of blood that you're going to see in any flick post BRAIN DEAD. It's also played for laughs and, you guessed it, pretty much sucks.

That's what really gets to me with this film; Quentin, as I've repeatedly spewed, was making a direct homage to those Asian movies of the 70s. However, while these films hold on an important place in the heart of many a fan, these films could never be described as good pieces of work. Fun? Sure. Important? Maybe. But as I laid out above, so much of them was utter garbage, and even as a ten-year old I found myself shaking my head repeatedly throughout a viewing. By not removing these parts and, indeed, highlighting them, Quentin has taken what could have been a fantastic homage into a near-parody. You want blood? Sure, here you go - let's take Johnny Depp's death scene in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and make everybody shoot blood out like that when they die! You want chopped off limbs? Sure, here you go - let's make everybody lose at least one limb, and have arms, legs and heads flying all over the place. You want our hero facing ridiculous, overwhelming odds (in this case, of eighty-eight to one) and still come through, even though the bad guys could have just rushed her and - God forbid - pulled out a gun at any time and ended the battle in seconds? Sure, here you go - and let's not only let her beat them easily, but have a laugh while she's doing it.
Worse, Tarantino sets up these concepts in the movie, but then breaks them. OK, so people bleed ridiculous amounts of blood before they die - fine. But then don't have somebody dying within minutes of having their tongue bitten out, only for someone else to live out half of the movie with several limbs missing. Duhhh. In the case of the latter, she must have been in possession of eighty or so pints of blood because she lost at least twenty with her first arm. Yes, it's not meant to be taken seriously, obviously. But it should have been. This should have been a serious movie.

The acting is decent enough; I'm not totally convinced that Uma Thurman was right for this role, but Quentin worships the ground she walks on (almost literally; the close-ups of her disgusting, chimp-like feet turn your stomach). Clearly she was in good shape, but more than once it was obvious that the distance shots of her fighting were actually some geezer in a blonde wig, only for the camera to then zoom in for a grimacing close-up of our Uma.
You don't see much of Bill (David Carradine), or Budd (Madsen), but the female members of the Viper Squad are given serious screen time. And with "beauties" like Uma, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah and Vivica A. Fox, nobody was really complaining. Except me, I guess. I don't find any of these women all that attractive; Liu and Fox stand above the reason. Thurman used to be gorgeous, but now she's a walking skeleton. Hannah has always looked like a walking skeleton. Her character is terrible; an eyepatch has never been cool, especially on a woman, and a medical eyepatch even less so (a TERRIBLE scene!). Aside from the Bride, Liu's O-Ren gets the most background, and she's the second best part of this movie, both from an acting and character perspective. Outside of the posse, and getting sound applause all round, Chiaki Kuriyama's (BATTLE ROYALE) Go Go Yubari, armed with ball and chain, is perhaps the one genuine reason to go and see this flick; she's uber-cool, and you gotta love the insanity in those eyes. You'd love to fuck her, but you know that pretty much for sure you'd never survive it (ease up, cowboy, Kuriyama is 19 years old). She kicks arse. You have to respect a woman who knows how to handle balls so masterfully. I loved her.

The film is split into five chapters, and the final part shows us the long-coming battle between the Bride and O-Ren. It's a nice scene, prefixed by the Bride single-handedly beating O-Ren's Crazy 88 without hardly breaking a sweat, and then facing O-Ren herself. Clearly, there's much respect between the two, and the Samurai-inspired scene, filmed outside in a beautiful, snowy landscape, is very attractive indeed. If only it handed ended so lousily; Quentin, mate, you set it up so wonderfully, and then pull the snowy rug away and leave us with farce. I saw shades of HANNIBAL, and wouldn't have been surprised if it concluded with the Bride tucking into a cerebral snack when she got back on the plane. And WHAT was the deal with the Bride being allowed to have her sword next to her on every flight? Hello? HELLO? Quentin? Is anybody home??? Shocking.
A few Quentin-esque touches were nice; a big poster that the Bride walks past displays Red Apple cigarettes. The Bride dons a pair of Clarance's, TRUE ROMANCE, Elvis sunglasses. I like that. But, overall, the usual feeling of cleverness so eloquently expressed by PULP FICTION and JACKIE BROWN was missing.
As I mentioned earlier, usually Tarantino's choice of music is pretty much spot-on. Every time I hear "Stuck In The Middle With You" I'm sent straight back to that cop's hell at the hands of Michael Madsen's Mr Blonde. Likewise, the PULP FICTION OST is about as good as it gets. In this movie, Quentin, once again throwing a nod towards the 1970s Asian flicks, chose to set up a scene pretty much exclusively on the back of the music. The O-Ren Ishii/Bride final battle is totally dominated by a very loud, and in my opinion, poorly chose theme that totally undercuts the beauty and impact of that fight. It just didn't work at all. There's some good stuff on the OST, but it pales next to his other movies.
As does KILL BILL as a whole. It's easily Quentin's worst flick to date. My gut reaction when it came out as, "That was bollocks." But I told myself to go away and think about it. I have done. It was bollocks. Sure, it was stylish bollocks, and there is some really good stuff in there, but overall, it's still bollocks. Quentin-worshippers will defend the superficiality of the movie with the same force that they would have torn-apart a Jean-Claude Van Damme flick that featured the same identical, ridiculous scenes. And that's their prerogative. But however much you look at it, and want to like it, this film is flawed, and it's for the very same reasons that inspired Tarantino to make it in the first place. The truth is, as I said, and this comes from a big fan, that those films of the 1970s just aren't really all that good. And despite the cool fighting and style, when you get below the surface, there's very little underneath indeed. Sure, I'll go and see the sequel - I do want to know how it pans out. But no matter how many times you watch this flick, it's never going to open up for you like PULP FICTION did.