QT Does it (Again)

Rating: Null/10 (3 November 2003)

You can tell when you've just watched a really great film. You find yourself replaying whole scenes in your head or sitting at your desk, daydreaming about the music or the action, or remembering choice moments of dialogue. Kill Bill: Volume 1 is one such film, a exhilarating experience from bullet brained beginning to revelatory end, it'll leave you with baited breath, counting down the seconds until Volume 2 appears in February.	At its core Kill Bill is an incredibly simple story. Take one woman out for revenge, pit her against five foes, ramp up the body count into triple figures and watch the blood (and dollars) flow. However, this is a Tarantino movie, and nothing is ever simple with him around.	A less skilled director would have made a total hash of the whole thing. Mixing western, martial arts, comedy, drama and revenge themes into the mix, not to mention creating perfectly choreographed, beautiful fight scenes and squeezing in some brilliant dialogue in the process, would have been too much for some. Not Quentin. Here he proves that sometimes, being a geek is good, his encyclopaedic knowledge of the various genre's helping to make every segment, every scene of the movie stand up and be counted. There is nothing, nothing in Kill Bill: Volume 1 that should have been cut.
There's no doubting that Kill Bill is a Tarantino movie. It has all of his trademarks (scene headers, sudden shifts in tone, even his obligatory boot shot) yet somehow, it all feels fresh, like you haven't seen it before. It has weirdness (hospital nurse Buck's way to may a few extra quid, Uma talking to her toe) and it has the non-linear narrative approach of Pulp Fiction, shifting back and forth in time as we learn more about the bride, and in a particularly brilliant scene, a manga cartoon introducing O-Ren Ishii's character. It's these marks of brilliance that, alone, would be enough to stamp this as a classic, but, there's more.	The fight scene's are without a doubt the most brutal, exciting and funny that have ever been filmed. Yes, okay, the violence is excessive, fountains of blood spraying from severed limbs, decapitated heads and chopped legs, but its played for laughs, clearly stated throughout the film. This is not to be taken seriously, it is just a movie, after all, where else could you take a samurai sword on board a Boeing 747? Exactly, its set in a parallel universe, where nobody thinks anything of 100 dead bodies, all created by the same person.	Kill Bill: Volume 1 creates so much tension, excitement and brutality in it's 1 hr 45 min running time and yet we're only halfway there, we still know next to nothing about Bill, Buddy, or Elle Driver (though we do catch a brief glimpse of her in this film). Also, we still don't know the brides real name, another eccentricity of Tarantino's, bleeping out her real name in the opening scene's. With so many unanswerd questions still left unanswered only one thing is certain: February is a helluva long time away!