a movie that works hard to annoy me

Rating: 5/10 (13 April 2004)

I like Quentin. I really do. I respect his love for the genres that influenced him, and I completely support his desire to actively pay homage to these genres through his movies. All three of his movies before Kill Bill did that, and I loved them. But I didn't love them because of some in-jokes they were making that cinephiles were all over. And I didn't love them because of the almost-casual way violence and depravity are shown in them. His first 3 movies are good because of characters that are interesting and human (even if they inhabit some kind of alternate fantasy reality), dialogue that's snappy and amusing, and plots intricate and well edited. That, and his raw ability as a director, of course.
Well, Kill Bill 1 has no shortage of the latter, and the in-jokes and cartoonish (and cartoon) gore fly in your face non-stop. But this movie has no heart. This movie's characters have no heart. The dialogue sure as hell has no heart. And, frankly -- though I'm sure this is on purpose -- the acting is equally lifeless. This film has action galore, all of which is well done though not particularly memorable, and that's the only thing it really has going for it.
The story is dead simple (not a bad thing in itself): The Bride (an expressionless Uma Thurman) is gunned down with her entire party during her wedding, even though she's pregnant. The culprits are the other 5 members of the assassination squad she was formerly a part of, headed by Bill himself (whom we hear but don't see in Vol. 1). Bill shoots the Bride in the head, but she survives and later wakes up from a coma. Understandably p***ed off, she decides to kill those that wronged her (and anyone else to come in her way).
The rest of the movie is about the Bride killing 2 of the 5 assassins: The barely-present Vivica A. Fox and O'Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), who's given an extensive backstory, both through anime and normal exposition.
So, Uma: (1) gets shot, (2) wakes up, (3) goes to Japan to build a sword, (4) fights O'Ren and helpers, (5) fights ... uh, Vivica. Granted, this is told a bit out of sequence (for NO discernible reason, unlike, say, Pulp Fiction), but this really is the gist. Oh, and O'Ren's backstory is shown in very gory anime form. The rest is reserved for Volume 2.
With a story like that, there'd better be something to keep us entertained, yes? Well, the dialogue is atypically empty (for some reason Quentin's usual profanity sounds ridiculously fake in the Vivica/Uma confrontation). The characters are all ruthless, evil bastards, even the Bride, really. (O'Ren would be cool, but read on.) And there's a LOT of sword-fighting. The thing that you'll notice right away is that gallons of blood spurt everywhere from open wounds. People are split every which way. Most of this is so over-the-top, you won't be grossed out or particularly moved by it. Some of the violence, however, goes into serious-slasher-movie territory, while in a few others moments the serious tone of the movie is combined with a ridiculous moment of gore to make one feel quite uneasy about enjoying it. That kind of thing did nothing for ME other than make feel uncomfortable. And if a film is supposed to be light-hearted fun, as you'd think about this one, at times, feeling annoyed should not be part of the deal. Kill Bill never decides what it wants to be when it comes to violence, and perhaps that's the director's intention, but the mood of the action is uneven enough to make me feel ambivalent about the action itself. To see what I mean, note the anime segment; the end of the O'Ren fight; and the end of the Gogo fight. At one point, the top of a character's head is chopped off, in graphic detail, on screen, at an extremely, extremely inappropriate moment emotionally. This sort of fate should be reserved for expendable drones, maybe, but not a principal character.
The action is solid enough that I might give this one a 6 or a 7. But all the annoying stuff is enough to rate it down to: 5/10.
NOTE: I don't care if Vol. 2 is better. This movie came out on its own, and it feels kind of like the first episode of a TV mini-series. And that's fine! It's not that it feels incomplete, as many say; it's just a weak episode.