Too Cool To Rule

Rating: 5/10 (19 December 2004)

"Kill Bill Vol. 1" is so cool it hurts. Really. It's so cool, the coolness gets in the way of it being a good film. Instead, we get an empty stylistic spectacle with cardboard caricatures, lame segues, and a weird snuff-porn schematic. How on earth Quentin Tarantino went from this to the solid cinematic achievement that is "Kill Bill Vol. 2" is beyond me.
A bride is left for dead in a Texas church with eight or nine other victims after a visit from her former comrades in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. After a four-year coma, she suddenly recovers and sets about getting her bloody revenge.
It's cool the film opens with the Shaw Brothers logo, telling us this is a homage to the chop-socky films Tarantino grew up with. It's cool Tarantino manages to stick in so many obvious homages to directors legendary and otherwise. But copious epigramming don't make for high achievement in film any more than in literature, and after a while the exercise becomes more obvious and annoying. There's no glue here, just a lot of winks and nods in scattered directions.
Uma Thurman does a serviceable job as The Bride, but she presents nothing close to the nuanced, sensitive character we see in "Vol. 2." She just runs around in a Bruce Lee jumpsuit killing people. David Carradine, who gives "Vol. 2's" best performance, is mostly MIA, and quite a different personality in his little voice-over bits here. The villains seem to do things for effect, rather than reason. One assassin allows her minions to get creamed by a single attacker without jumping in to lend a hand, perhaps thinking about the pension savings but hardly helping herself down the road, when she must fight her attacker all by herself. Another sequence has an assassin being called up at the last possible minute to cancel a murder, because he feels he owes it to the comatose victim not to be a "rat" about it, though that didn't stop him before from shooting her while she lay defenseless on the floor. Beautiful people merrily subject themselves to dismemberment, disembowelment, and assorted mayhem, because it's cool.
After a while, it all just feels like a massive put-on, something to go with the cool music and cool costumes and everything else. Even the dialogue, which usually shines in Tarantino films, seems perfunctory. Everything is subsumed by image.
There are some good moments. Sonny Chiba delivers a funny and poignant performance as a retired katana maker of great repute from whom The Bride seeks help, in a rare sequence not belabored with blood or film references. There's some laughs amid the violence that show Tarantino hasn't lost his gift for balancing action, suspense, and comedy.
But the fights go on too long, and feel pointless. Can anyone look at The Bride's battle with the Crazy 88 after watching "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," worked on by the same fight coordinator, and not see how hokey the former looks by comparison? The anime sequence is also overlong and bloody, not to mention self-indulgent.
Maybe it was intentional on the filmmaker's part to have such a comic-book introduction, with broad strokes galore, and leave the human dimension for "Vol. 2." If so, it certainly works. "Vol. 2" is a terrific film, perhaps more. But "Vol. 1" is so cool, it left me frozen.