I'll kill myself if I have to sit through this again

Rating: 1/10 (14 October 2003)

I'm a fan of QT and much admire his earlier films, but sorry sports fans, Kill Bill is a tedious piece of junk. That Tarantino planned at one point to release both "volumes" as one three-hour film is astonishing. After the first hundred severed limbs, I couldn't stop yawning. With its inexorable cartoon violence; the predictable BS posturing of virtually every major character; and the obvious trajectory of its threadbare plot, Bill is technically flawless, emotionally antiseptic, and dramatically dormant. Clearly, QT has spent himself. To be fair, Reservoir Dogs was a masterpiece; Pulp Fiction, audacious and brilliant...tick tock tick tock... Then Jackie Brown, a nice adaptation, but hardly earth shaking. And now comes Bill, which owes everything to cheesy, grade-C, 1970s Japanese fight-flicks. Buckets of blood and meat-grinding mayhem do not of themselves make for scintillating cinema. The trick that eludes Tarantino is how to keep the viewers' attention while he attempts a hybrid of Seven Samauri and the World Wrestling Federation. The sensual aspects alone should have been enough to sustain interest, but no. Ultimately, Bill becomes an exercise in fever-pitched tedium. Perfecting the cinematic equivalent of crap is hardly an achievement, no matter how well-crafted the montages.