Not up to Tarantino's usual standards

Rating: 4/10 (26 October 2005)

Roger Ebert once wrote that Quentin Tarantino could make a bad film but could never make a boring film. Well, "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" is a boring film. Above all, it's monotonous, because most of the film is just a lengthy series of fights lacking any context that would allow us to side with one character over another. Worst of all, the heroine is presented as some kind of Unstoppable Force whom no one stands a chance against, especially males. This premise reaches the height of absurdity when she takes on a few hundred fighters at the same time. Now, I'm no big fan of "The Matrix" or its sequels, but the scene where Neo battles a hoard of Agent Smiths at least makes sense within the rules the story has established. There is nothing to explain why Uma Thurman's character is so powerful. We're just forced to accept that she's this invincible killing machine, a premise that robs of the film of one of the crucial ingredients of suspense, which is that the main character faces a challenge.
Another crucial ingredient that's conspicuously absent is emotional investment in the characters. We're supposed to sympathize with Thurman because of how her cohorts betrayed her, but what difference does it make when she's as much of a cold, ruthless killer as they are? Okay, so she doesn't hurt children. Big deal. She is drawn way too thinly to give us any reason to root for her.
You can love or hate "Pulp Fiction," but you cannot possibly accuse it of being predictable. And the characters, while amoral by our standards, have definite human qualities--one of the most telling scenes is when John Travolta says he's going to go home and have a heart attack. It's the type of thing an ordinary person would say in that situation, and it makes you forget that he's a hit-man. I can't figure out why anyone would think that brilliant film is in any way comparable to "Kill Bill: Vol. 1," which is sorely lacking in the witty dialogue that Tarantino is famous for, and which has none of the richness and complexity of "Pulp Fiction" that invites repeat viewings and helps you overlook the fact that you aren't sure what the point of the story is.
I also think the violence in this film is excessive. That may seem a strange thing for a Tarantino fan to say. But don't confuse violence with shock: Tarantino is a master at manipulating audience reaction, even when he isn't showing things anywhere near as graphically as he could. A classic example is the needle-to-the-heart scene in "Pulp Fiction." We never see the actual impact, but we do feel it.
The stylized gore of "Kill Bill" is a lot less interesting, in my view. It's one thing to show Thurman chop a character's arm off. It's quite another to show a geyser of blood, making it look like the character's body is literally being drained--then, a while later, finding out that the character is not only still alive, but fully conscious and lucid. The rules of this film's universe are so arbitrary there's no point in even talking about suspension of disbelief.
The sequel is a vastly superior film, filling in the character motivations, suspense, and humor that the first film so desperately needed. Tarantino could have condensed the events of the first film into fifteen minutes and made the entire story into one long film, which actually would not have been that long. Why did he make the first film as he did, probably turning off many of his former fans? At least he was trying something new rather than simply rehashing his old ideas, but this time the experiment was a failure.