"Leave the limbs you've lost... they belong to me now." Cool super violent action flick.

Rating: 8/10 (4 July 2007)

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 starts as the pregnant Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman) is shot & left for dead in a wedding chapel, however she is not dead & after spending four years in a coma she awakens. She was a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad code named Black Mamba, she had decided to leave & her boss Bill (David Carradine) wasn't happy about it so he sent in the other members, Vernita Green AKA Copperhead (Vicica A. Fox), Budd AKA Sidewinder (Michael Madsen), Elle Driver AKA California Mountain Snake (Daryl Hannah) to kill her. Now she is hell bent on getting revenge for herself & her dead daughter, her first target is O-Ren Ishii AKA Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu) who since become lord of the Tokyo underground...
Written & directed by Quentin Tarantino Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is a tremendous film for martial arts & action junkies & is much better then Kill Bill: Vol 2 (2004) in my opinion. The homage heavy ultra violent script moves along like a rocket here unlike it's sequel & contains in abundance everything that lacked. It's excessively violent, it's packed with some fantastic martial arts set-pieces, it has a good story about cold blooded revenge & is just utterly cool in virtually every regard. The character's are good with some over-the-top bad guys, the dialogue is alright & Tarantino has thankfully cut back on the profanity a bit. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 doesn't have any great meaning, it has no message, isn't realistic in the slightest & isn't interested in 'saying' anything as it's main aim is to excite, entertain, show Thurman running around killing lots of people in spectacular ways & pay homage to a variety of genre films. In fact there are more homages & nods to other films in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 than maybe any other film I've seen, you'll never get them all though. How can you not like a film where the entire last twenty minutes is nothing more than a blood filled massacre? That's right, you can't. A top film that is proud to be what it is, mindless violence filled martial arts fun & nothing else.
Director Tarantino turns on the style here big time & again it's so much better than Kill Bill: Vol. 2 in that respect. There's a little animated segment which is in the style of Japanese Anime which looks great, Uma Thurman in her yellow tracksuit with samurai sword will surely become an iconic image, there's loads of poetic wonderfully choreographed sword fights & violence with huge amounts of blood spurting & spraying everywhere in Shogun Assassin (1980) style! There's decapitations, peoples legs are sliced off, wood with nails stuck in it is used to kill, arms are graphically sliced off with with the victims rolling around in agony, people are impaled on swords, sliced up by swords, someone has their eyeball plucked out, axes are thrown & hit people in the chest & forehead, someone is cut in half vertically (Shogun Assassin again), someone has the top of their head sliced off, a mans head is bashed with a door, someones lip is ripped off, there are over-the-top amounts of spurting blood that resemble fountains, lots of sword & knife fights & the body count has to be somewhere approaching the 100 mark. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 delivers the goods but I don't like it when it switches to black and white, I just found it annoying & unnecessary & why didn't they release the full colour version throughout the rest of the world since it was just the American censors that had a problem?
With a supposed budget of about $65,000,000 Kill Bill: Vol. 1 looks great with slick cinematography, great effects, fantastic set-pieces & high production values. The music is very good as well & Tarantino uses it to great effect. The acting is OK but then this isn't really about acting, David Carradine is never seen during this film which I thought was odd.
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is a classic & there's no doubt about it, I love it for it's excessive violence & bloodshed along with it's style & cool revenge plot. It's not very deep or meaningful but who cares? If you don't like violence then stay well away but for anyone else this is a must.