Bonkers Tarantino Retro-Style Cantonese Revenge Story With Unmissable Action Scenes

Rating: 8/10 (18 June 2005)

A hideously-wronged female avenger left for dead on her wedding day tracks down her former colleagues from an assassination team (lead by the eponymous Bill) and treats them to some cold-hearted justice.
Quentin Tarantino's first movie in six years is the first of a two-part epic homage to the old Shaw Brothers Cantonese kung-fu classics of the seventies, and makes for deliciously overblown entertainment. This is the kind of movie you just don't see these days, where a director has been allowed to write his own ticket and go absolutely bonkers. It's fantastic. The main setpiece is a breathtaking samurai swordfight in a Tokyo restaurant, which pretty much manages to beat anything Jackie Chan, Tsui Hark or John Woo have ever done. The whole movie pulsates with crackling energy and rocks to a typically eclectic mix of music ranging from Asian beats to elevator pan-pipes musak. Art design, action choreography, editing and camera-work are all razor-sharp, and all of the numerous limb-hackings are accompanied by some of the most gloriously squishy sound-effects I've ever heard. The cast (including a great serio-comic turn from Chiba, who starred in many of the films that inspired this) somehow manage to inject some reality into the collection of lunatics they play. To a large extent this movie exists somewhere beyond criticism - it's only half a movie, its timeframe is all over the place (in the classic Tarantino tradition), it goes off into a manga animation section in the middle, half the dialogue is in Japanese, there are enormous credibility holes (characters are allowed to carry samurai swords with them on modern-day airliners) and not a whole lot makes sense. I just wish more people made movies with this kind of sensibility.