This is a feature-length "Itchy & Scratchy"...

Rating: Null/10 (11 October 2003)

...made for film nerds, kung-fu geeks, Tarantino groupies, and the smarter-than-average 12-year old. Check your brain at the door, batten down the hatches, and prepare for kinetic overload.
Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
A paean to the Shaw Brothers, Golden Harvest et.al., "Kill Bill" is nearly plotless, populated with strawman characters and, for the most part, just fitfully staggers from one overly-long martial arts set piece to another. A few stylistic fillips aside (e.g. the anime; the main characters are all female; the male characters are all oafs, eunuchs, or Sonny Chiba; the cartoonish, laugh inducing, firehose jets of blood shooting from severed body parts), the action is pretty much standard-issue chop-socky -- been done a thousand times before. And if there was ever a "...if you've seen one, you've pretty much seen 'em all..." genre, it's kung-fu movies.
From Quentin Tarantino, though, I expected more, and "Kill Bill" doesn't deliver.
I wanted to see Tarantino create a new cinematic syntax, to be dazzled like I was the first time I saw "Pulp Fiction". Instead, as I watched this movie, I found myself ticking off the boxes of a mental checklist of what have become, in the decade since "Pulp Fiction", Tarantino Movie Cliches. Uma's feet, non-linear narrative, episodic structure, art-card chapter headings, dorky pop culture references, more of Uma's feet, etc. Nope, nothing new here.
Nowhere in evidence is the crisp, sharp as a razor, Tarantino dialogue. The only scene in the movie that works on any sort of dramatic level is in the restaurant with Sonny Chiba and his assistant, and that's mostly in Japanese. No, when blood isn't spurting and swords aren't singing, this movie just sits there, in slow motion, like an underwater ballet.
For a fan of kung-fu movies, the big-budget production values and slick soundtrack make this an extraordinary example of the genre. For a fan of Quentin Tarantino, it's probably a must-see, well, just because. For me, though, it was a disappointment.