KB sums Tarantino up: all bark, no bite.

Rating: 2/10 (27 June 2004)

Kill Bill is variously indulgent, shocking, corny, genre-clichéd, self-reflexive and plain thievery. Despite the fact that it tries to be a million other movies, in the end its hard to say what exactly Kill Bill is, and that's the highest compliment i can pay it.
I'm exaggerating, though, because Kill Bill is nothing more than a sickeningly simple revenge story taken intravenously from Sergio Leone with samurai philosophy and fights with big buildups that don't end up happening.
Look back at the final fight of Vol 1, or Elle Driver's demise in Vol 2 - they sum up what frustrates me about Kill Bill, and Tarantino's personality - a whole lot of build up (drawn-out closeups with crecendoing music before the fight; talking your movie up in interviews before its premiere) then a soft fizzle (Lucy Liu can't really operate a sword - there's just a whole lot of running around, smoke and mirrors, hardly even one sword-clash, before the final blow... Elle Driver: The Bride pulls her eye out instead of the fight happening). There is so much build up with music pilfered from other people's movie scores (mainly of Morricone music), that nobody seems to notice that the actual fight never happens!
Tarantino tries to convince us he does this on purpose, under the guise of "f**king with the audience."
Tarantino talks so much he'll always find some way of making his movie sound clever - but in the end, the talk's cleverer than the cinema is. Movies aren't essentially linguistic - that's books. Movies consist of moving images, and by reducing that to words you avoid discussing the reality of the movie itself, distort it and pretend its something its not. This is an artifact of all reviews, including this one - but there's something a whole lot less objective about the way Tarantino raves about why his own movies are clever. Unfortunately, Kill Bill requires us to think of movies like Quentin does to think its clever.
Quentin's constantly pointing out "look how I f**k with the audience" is a method of distracting us from the content of the movie. Quentin seems to have forgotten that its the audience he's supposed to be entertaining, not himself. Movies are entertainment - at least, genre movies are. What QT considers "clever," I say is indulgent and makes for an impoverished movie-viewing experience.
He can describe the movie however he wants, but the reality of watching the movie is that every scene runs uncomfortable long, the dialogue delivery is corny (though much worse in Vol 1), his "references" grow to dominate his movies more and more, so that the end product is more synthetic than organic, the performances are 100 % Ham, and the style-over-substance (and not an original style anyway) nature of it results in a pretentious, empty experience.