The 1st Review Of Kill Bill By Jeff Stone

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2004)

Contains spoilers

"A triumph of style over substance" is a well-worn cliche in filmdom, but it sums up Kill Bill Vol. 1 perfectly. On the face of it, this is a beautifully directed, hyper-kinetic action movie...but look even slightly below the surface and you begin to see the many cracks in the mask. The first thing that struck me about the movie was the declaration in the credits that this was 'The 4th Film By Quentin Tarantino'. My immediate response was: "Yes it is...so what? Why it is necessary to point this out?" My second response was: "It's not the 4th film by Tarantino, it's the *first half* of the 4th film." The declaration might be a good way to sell the movie in a trailer or on a lobby poster, but to actually use it in the *opening credits* is probably the most repugnant example of a director's self-love I have ever experienced. OK, onto the specifics of the movie. As I said, Kill Bill Vol. 1 is fantastically directed, and ranks as Tarantino's finest effort in this field. The mixture of media (anime and live action) is inspired, if hardly original - Oliver Stone, for example, used it in Natural Born Killers, the original screenplay of which Tarantino wrote. The pace never flags, and the shifting timescale is handled as deflty as it was in Pulp Fiction. (Still not sure the voiceovers were necessary, though). The movie strikes me as a sort of Tarantuino Greatest Hits compilation. That's what ultimately sinks Kill Bill, folks. It's completely unoriginal. The plot is wafer thin, if not non-existent. One might argue that the 'revenge flick' genre, of which this movie is definitely an example, needs no plot, but that's just a cop-out. We've seen so many takes on this idea that anyone attempting to do it these days has to bring something new to the table. And for all its' undeniable visual artistry, Tarantino just gives us the same old stuff again. Oh, but it's a tribute to grindhouse 70s cinema, you might say. Indeed; but what Tarantino and many other people seem to have conveniently forgotten is that 95% of those movies were *terrible*. Uma Thurman is very good as The Bride...why her name is bleeped out on the two or three occasions it is used is just one of the bafflingly pointless touches in the flick...and acquits herself excellently in the battle scenes. Sadly, however, most of the dialogue she and everyone else is given to say is ghastly, clunky nonsense. The dialogue is like the film as a whole...you are constantly being told that you are watching a spoof or 'homage', and if a movie has to do that to convince you it's just kidding, then you're in trouble. The plot, such as it is, has numerous plotholes, most of which concern The Bride. How does she manage to evade capture or even police attention for her numerous murders? Where does she get the money from to buy plane tickets and hire(?) motorbikes? Why does she need to draw up a death list for herself comprising only five people; five people she knows intimately and will never forget?!! Guest star Sonny Chiba, of the classic 70s Street Fighter series, is the definite highlight acting-wise. Chiba plays master sword maker Hanzo Hattori with great dignity, tempered with humour (his argument with his assistant is very funny)...I get the feeling he hasn't been given the chance to play such a nicely shaded role too often. The other major star in the movie, Lucy Liu (as Oren Ishii) is at the other end of the scale. Liu is, I'm sorry, folks, as completely wooden here as she is in every other film she's done. And it doesn't help that her hugely distracting lazy eye turns every close-up she's given into an unintentional visual joke. The film also has a very peculiar schizophrenic attitude to the Japanese, also...one moment it treats Japanese culture with reverence and respect, and the next it's depicting the people of that country as babbling, incompetent idiots who can't fight to (literally) save their lives. The biggest joke of the movie comes at the end, when, after The Bride has wiped out 60 or 70 Yakusa killers single-handed, Liu comments that The Bride 'cannot fight like a samurai'. Beg your pardon? The final battle between Oren and The Bride is also hugely anti-climactic, and largely consists of the two women staring at each other. Other points to close with. 1) Has no-one in this movie outside of the anime sequence heard of an invention called the gun? 2) If you're going to blatantly steal the torrential blood sprays from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Quentin, at least have the courtesy to show a character saying "Ni!" or 'Tis but a flesh wound' at some stage. Ridiculous. 3) The all-female Japanese rockabilly band, the 5678s, that feature during the Yakusa battle, must've been chosen by Tarantino because they were the single worst exponents of their art on the planet. 4) The only reason The Bride rides a motorbike in the Tokyo sequence is so Tarantino can put her in yellow bike leathers and thus poach some glory from Bruce Lee's unfinished masterwork Game Of Death. 5) The trailers and lobby art slogans proclaim that in 2003, Uma Thurman will kill Bill. Er, she doesn't even come close to Bill in Vol. 1. I think you should've been honest and said that she'll do the deed in *2004*. Well, I'll be keen to see Volume 2, if only to see the rest of what should've been one movie. Despite what I've said, this was a good popcorn flick that starts off as a slickly-edited collision of Reservoir Dogs' blood and and Pulp Fiction's episodic structure and turns into idiotic crud only in the third act. A hugely derivative, obnoxiously smug, clunkily written, occasionally pretentious movie, but good all the same.