More Japanese Steel in the Editing Room, Please

Rating: Null/10 (16 October 2003)

Quentin Tarrantino once spoke about the infamous scene from Reservoir Dogs in which Michael Madsen takes his knife to a cop's ear. In the final edit of that scene, the camera pans away, leaving us to listen to agonized screams. Mr. Tarrantino notes that test audiences were far less horrified by an early cut of the scene in which all of the gory details were shown.
Of course, a good film maker wouldn't have needed a test audience to tell him this. At least as far back as Hitchcock, they have understood that creating suspense is at least as much a matter of what you don't show as it of what you do. In Kill Bill, Mr. Tarrantino has manifestly failed to recall this lesson. Here we see not only the ear, but nearly every other human body part removed in full, blood-spraying glory.
While I wasn't particularly disturbed or offended by any of this, I did come away wondering what the point of it was. The violence here is so supersized that at times it threatens to consume the entire film. This is particularly felt in the film's patient, stylish and well-filmed climax, who's cutting edge is left dull by the numbing splatterfest that precedes it.

Apparently, one popular explanation/justification for all this violence is that it is so intense that it eventually becomes comical. Well, maybe, but I think it really depends on your idea of what is funny. The Road Runner was violent, ha-ha funny. Monty Python's Black Knight was violent, ha-ha funny. Kill Bill is violent, I-can't-believe-someone-actually-put-that-on-film funny.
Then of course, there is the legions of QT fanboys who toss around words like 'homage' and 'pastiche' like so many throwing stars. "Don't you get it? Three decapitations-per-minute is, like, a reference to old kungfu movies, see?" Well, these people clearly have never actually watched any of the old Shaw Brothers films to which Kill Bill declares itself a paean. While certainly violent, those films were rarely more than slightly gory, if only because they lacked a $10 million budget for latex and fake blood.
Nonetheless, QT's mastery of exploiting the exploitation film is clearly evidenced in Kill Bill's plot, dialog, editing, and soundtrack. But for my money, films like Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are still much better genre reinventions because their directors don't feel compelled to hide behind winking pop-postmodernism. I dunno, maybe I'm getting old, but Mr. Tarrantino's brand of irony just isn't doing it for me anymore.