cool, stylish, empty

Rating: Null/10 (5 December 2004)

Quentin Tarentino's 'Kill Bill, Volume 1' is the perfect film for today's 'trendy chic' movie going audience. Casual in its violence, flashy in its visuals, and conspicuously lacking in content and theme, the film is a genuine triumph of style over substance and a testament to the art of 'cool.' Here is a film so self-consciously arch and emotionally detached that it plays more like a live action cartoon than a drama set in anything remotely resembling the real world (in fact, one section of the movie literally is a cartoon). The 'plot' is, essentially, one long drawn out revenge scene with Uma Thurmon as a young woman systematically seeking out and killing a band of assassins who left her, her unborn child, and her entire bridal party for dead on the day of her wedding.
Yet, what person in his right mind goes to a Tarentino film in search of a meaningful storyline? Indeed, the thing that counts in a Tarentino work is the director's obvious love for both movies and movie-making, a love which is visible in every frame he commits to film. 'Kill Bill' is Tarentino's affectionate homage to the martial arts epics in which characters defy the laws of physics and gravity as they perform their deadly kabuki-type ballet with knives and swords. In this pastiche of ninja melodrama and Japanese anime, at least half the film's running time is spent on elaborately staged swordfights and kickboxing sequences, all of which are filmed with the utmost brio and verve. The violence is, indeed, gory and graphic - with dismemberments galore and fountains of spurting blood - but so preposterously overblown that the violence eventually becomes abstract and thus doesn't offend us much while we're watching it. Thurmon doesn't have much of a chance to develop a character here, but the steel-eyed intensity combined with the strange sense of vulnerability that she brings to the role makes her fascination to watch nonetheless.
Yet, for all its cinematic joie de vivre and visual inventiveness, there's something a bit unsatisfying about 'Kill Bill Volume 1' after all is said and done. Perhaps it's the fact that the film feels so much like a clinical exercise in style that it lacks the power to really draw us into its world. We watch it with an air more of detached bemusement than of emotional involvement. Perhaps, too, the absence of anything much going on beneath the surface leaves us with little of substance to take home with us once we've left the theater. I suspect that this is the very effect Tarentino is going for here - that if we were made to care deeply about anything that was happening on the screen we would somehow be violating his code of 'coolness,' that we would be simply reacting to movies with the kind of programmed emotional responses the director is clearly militating against. The problem is that, while we can appreciate all that on an intellectual level, we are still left feeling relatively empty and unfulfilled by movie's end. Perhaps, the completion of the story in Volume 2 will help to rectify that condition.