20 styles in search of a director

Rating: 3/10 (16 October 2003)

If you love anything by Tarantino, you'll probably like this. If you disliked Jackie Brown, you'll be disappointed by this, too. When the QT is good, he's brilliant. But he's far from good in "Kill Bill."
Unlike "Pulp Fiction," the violence here is mostly gratuitous. Unlike the artful use of cliches in "Reservoir Dogs," the cliches here are just cliches. As in "Jackie Brown," the acting is horribly inconsistent. Uma Thurman is great trying to get up out of her hospital bed and flirting with a sushi chef, but she falls down playing the heavy.
There are a number of excellent scenes: Black Mamba battling a cast of thousands, a handicapped Black Mamba versus a nightmare of a hospital guard, Black Mamba mano a mano against Copperhead...but there's the rub. The battles are fun, captivating, and (sometimes) as artistic as anything in "Hidden Dragon..." or Jackie Chan's best, but there isn't really anything to sustain the tension between scenes.
"Bill" is just a cliched bad guy, shown only in below-the-neck profiles, rubbing his scabbard. And QT fails to draw the other gang members with any more detail. There's a long narrative scene about O-Ren Ishii's (Lucy Liu's) rise to power--but it's just a narrative, as dull and dry as listening to someone read from the Congressional Record --and with as little to do with the rest of the film, too.
And that's the next problem: there are five or ten different directorial styles in the film and there's nothing tying them together. It plays like a series of movie shorts on the same topic (violence in gangster/samurai films) narrated by the same person. I'm convinced the only reason the O-Ren scene remains in the movie was that QT wanted to try his hand at anime. It doesn't appear to have its own place in the movie.
Like Wagner's Operas, "Kill Bill" has some great moments and lousy half-hours. Unlike Wagner, I'm not inclined to return after the intermission to see "Kill Bill: Vol. 2."