Entertaining But Trivial

Rating: 5/10 (10 June 2007)

Tarantino makes movies about other movies: his films lift everything from characters to plot devices to camera angles, glosses up the costumes and attitudes, laces them with adolescent humor, and then swirls all the bits and pieces together in a tub of blood. The results have been extremely inconsistent but never less than interesting in at least an academic, art house sort of way.
KILL BILL, VOLUME 1 is essentially a teenage boy's blood and sex fantasy run amok. The story is so classically revenge it might have--and maybe was--inspired by Elizabethan drama. A woman who has been a member of an international squad of hired assassins becomes pregnant and decides to marry and retire; at her wedding reception, however, her handler and co-killers crash the event and kill every one. Well, almost every one: she survives. Four years later she awakens from a coma, is mightily ticked about the whole thing, and decides to kill everyone who was involved in the attack.
As in PULP FICTION, Tarantino borrows a great deal from a host of film masters, perhaps most notably from Hitchcock, Kubric, Altman, Stone, and Lynch: narrative camera angles that rise to provide a bird's eye view of the actors as they move through the sets, disjointed time, overlapping plots, and a heavily stylized visual sense. He also borrows a great deal from 1960s and 1970s "trash cinema," most particularly Kung Fu foolishness and deliberately sparse spaghetti Westerns. In terms of story and overall execution, however, this is essentially the stuff of a pimple-ridden teenage boy's blood and sex fantasies: sexy women fighting, shooting, and slashing the hell out of each other.
In this instance Tarantino gets away with it because he seldom gives you very much time to think about any of it--and on the rare occasions when he does, he goes out of his way to point out his various juxtapositions with a gleeful "I Meant To Do That!" finger. And there is a lot about the film that is quite funny in the same pitch black, subversive way that PULP FICTION was funny. Two women square off in a snow-drenched Japanese garden to Spanish music and so on, the sort of small inter-cultural cinematic jibe that Tarantino does so well when he puts his mind to it. It's actually very entertaining.
But there is a problem here, and it is the same problem that has plagued every one of Tarantino's films. Yes, the film is deliberately trendy in a truly relentless way and often very funny as a result; yes, the fight choreography is visually stunning; yes, the deliberate clash of music and visuals and cultures is often very witty. But in the end it is all a surface cleverness with nothing underneath, and the film is really Tarantino's ode to how hip and cool he wants us to think he is. We never see him on the screen, but we're constantly aware of him standing off to one side screaming "LOOK AT ME!" You might describe the whole thing as an entertaining study in the director's overcompensation for not actually being the "super-cool" guy of his own cinematic fantasies.
Note to Mr. Tarantino: as a friend of mine is fond of saying, "cool" can't be acquired, it simply is, and you either have it or you don't. I've never met you, but I'm pretty sure that you aren't a quarter as "cool" as you tell people you are, and I'm also pretty certain that you know it yourself. Now, you actually seem to be a talented guy; why don't you stop this foolishness and actually do your own movie instead of tap-dancing through all the stuff, good and bad, you saw when you were fifteen? That said, I actually rather liked the film. (A lot of people won't. It is very bloody and the humor involved is dark.) It's worth a look, and if you don't expect anything except pure surface you may well enjoy it. But it's not something I'll watch again and I can't see myself going out of the way to see KILL BILL VOLUME 2.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer