Triumph of style over substance

Rating: 5/10 (15 June 2009)

There is no doubt that Quentin Tarrantino is an extremely talented director in terms of editing, cinematography and the overall look of a film. Just take the extraordinary scene in Kill Bill, amazingly choreographed, where Uma Thurman dispatches over a hundred swordsman in a matter of minutes. It's simply incredible! What's more Tarrantino as one of the masters of film history, takes his knowledge of film genres and improves on each one of them. He mixes all kinds of styles including Kung Fu, Japanese Samurai and Anime, Italian Spaghetti Westerns and the Black Exploitation films of the 70s and comes up with his own inventive hybrid.
Despite the sheer inventiveness of Kill Bill, Vol. 1, it's really an exercise in style over substance. Tarrantino is more interested in creating an homage to these various genres as opposed to a parody. And I think that's the problem. Notice there are virtually no laughs in Kill Bill (unless you consider all the exaggerated decapitations and limbs being chopped off to be funny). Tarrantino actually takes delight in these Grade C gorefests of yesteryear and attempts to elevate these pictures to high art. Instead of trying to emulate a great master like Ingmar Bergman, Tarrantino chooses to revel in the mindless violence of Samurai swordsman and Kung Fu fighters. Most of it is harmless stuff, the kind of mindless action scenes that most adolescents will take delight in. But occasionally Tarrantino crosses the line into the netherworld of bad taste. I'm thinking of that wholly inappropriate scene toward the beginning of the picture when Uma Thurman kills one of her rivals with a young child watching.
It's quite clear from the outset that character motivation is virtually ignored in Kill Bill, Vol. 1. As Uma Thurman's 'Bride' dispatches members and underlings of the 'Deadly Viper Assassination Squad', we come to learn that she has taken revenge on the associates of "Bill" after he betrays her at her own wedding. We never learn the circumstances as to why the Bride is betrayed. Occasionally Tarrantino serves up a few surprises such as when the orderly allows 'customers' to rape the comatose Uma or Matsumoto's pedophilia (the crime lord who Lucy Liu does in). But overall there are few surprises in 'Volume 1'; we move from one revenge killing to another--all the frenzied killing scenes tend to bleed (no pun intended) into one another.
Vol. 2 supposedly provides the back story but what we're left with in Volume 1 are comic book characters who we simply cannot care about. Everyone is fearless as they try to do one another in. In Tarrantino's comic book world, the guardians of morality are powerless—that's why law enforcement only makes the briefest of appearances at the beginning of the film.
When The Bride travels to Okinawa and meets her mentor, Hattori Hanzo, I found that all the pious pronouncements about the spirituality of the Samurai to be pretentious and out of place in a film that places the highest value on dismemberment for its own sake. What's more, all the serious pseudo-spirituality slows the pacing of the film down considerably.
Tarrantino represents the embodiment of the American cinema today. He's exciting, technically savvy with a healthy respect for the history of film. But at the same time, his films only offer up a superficial and seductive examination of evil in the world today. If Tarrantino was a comedian, he best could be likened to the Three Stooges—his adroitly choreographed gorefests are akin to the Stooges' pie-in-the-face slapstick routines. Tarrantino is the perennial adolescent continually caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is nice to look at but is much easier on the eyes than on the mind.