A Roaring Rampage of Destruction

Rating: 8/10 (15 August 2005)

An elite assassin (Uma Thurman), after waking from a 4-year coma, takes bloody vengeance on those who wronged her. Said assassin had given up her wild ways before being brutalized by former comrades (with friends like these, you don't need enemies, ha-ha-ha). Quentin Tarantino creates a violent tale which might just as well be a fable taking place a hundred or even a thousand years ago, the actual events perhaps slanted or exaggerated by the passage of time. In a sense, this could be a series of incidents taking place now, being told by storytellers in the year 2100, yes? Isn't this what Tarantino is doing - creating new legends for us to talk about and ponder? The characters in these tales do not behave so much like contemporary citizens as they do mythical heroes and villains; they're more like archetypes than real people. They seem more like ideas of how classic figures in a modern setting would act. How about the daughter of the first villain we see our heroine kill? Would she really just stand there expressionless, upon seeing her mother dead on the floor? In the Tarantino universe, she's just a future heroine or villain, destined to exact more vengeance in a never-ending cycle of bloodletting.
The key to making this particular film work is for the audience to buy into the capability of the main character, a female, in dishing out such an impressive revenge. This is not as simple as it seems, even in today's modern film world, if going by box office returns (I'm thinking of "The Long Kiss Goodnight" from 1996 with Geena Davis, which should have been a surefire hit; then move ahead to "Elektra" this year). It's not that women can't be as mean as men in this regard. They just haven't been able to tap into that sensibility on screen so that audiences can go along for the ride. Tarantino doesn't appear to have a problem conveying that sensibility with his female actors. It may also help that The Bride character here is acting on her maternal instincts, rather than having them work against her, as in other movies. There's nothing quite so primal as fighting for your child, whether for vengeance or protection.
I could go on about the various cinematic tricks Tarantino employs here, such as sudden black & white footage and anime, but the one that really impressed me was his use of music. He plugs in previously known musical bits into his own visualizations and you come away with a new appreciation for the tunes. Though the general thinking is that volumes one and two were originally intended as one film, another masterstroke is having the Bill character faceless and mysterious throughout this first volume. It teases the audience with what's coming in the 2nd volume, especially with that revelation in the last few seconds.