Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

Starring Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen.
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Produced by Lawrence Bender and Quentin Tarantino.
Distributed by Miramax Films.
110 minutes.

LVJeff's Rating: conditional 10/10

In for the Kill

"The Eastern culture is having an orgasm from all the love Tarantino is giving it." The person I saw Kill Bill: Vol. 1 with said that, and I don't think I could've stated it better. It pretty much says it all. Remember Roberto Benigni at the 1999 Oscars? When he walked on top of all the chairs and got up on stage and said he wanted to make love to everyone? Imagine that as a film, with old Hong Kong martial arts revenge flicks as its subject of adoration, and with stylistic discipline. It's that energetic, that spirited, that sincere. Yes, it is orgiastic.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 isn't ashamed to be what it is -- a fetish flick. Quentin Tarantino's id is spilling all over the screen, and he knows it. The movie isn't just displaying evidence of his midnight kung-fu movie influences, it's collecting them and making full use of what made them so entertaining. The plot is the simple, over-used story of revenge. The drama attached to it is knowingly made palpable. The violence is cheesy, yet delivered with conviction. And the movie loves its odd characters and their off-colored personalities. And added to all that are elements from a more modern mindset to enhance its sense of attitude. Shots are composed like wicked postcards. Modern wire-fu techniques give the action more flair. There's even a section telling part of the story in anime.

The film also fetishizes its star, Uma Thurman. She gets handled by the camera more than she might have in a Hitchcock movie. We get close-ups of Uma's face, her hands, her feet, her eyes. We get her lying on the floor, covered in blood; and we get her whirling a katana like a Tasmanian devil in Bruce Lee's yellow tracksuit, occasionally striking samurai poses. I never thought I'd see her doing stuff like this, but it contributes to the beauty of this cultural meld of a movie. The incongruence of a beautiful blonde as the heroine of an Eastern revenge pic is the tip of a sword made from a combination of the Hong Kong grittiness and American slickness; of old-style cheap-budget films and the films resulting from an auteur given too much budgetary freedom; and strong female characters and a male-dominated genre.

Tarantino has got to be the luckiest filmmaker on earth. No one else could have gotten away with making something like this -- this orgy/fetish movie. But at least he loads it where it counts. He finds the appropriate soundtrack for every scene. He makes Lucy Liu look fascinating as a geisha-samurai. He uses color-filters to enforce the mood in particular moments, as opposed to using one look throughout. He tells the story using flashbacks, narration, subtitles, and title-cards -- whatever gets the job done for the relevant moment. Similarly utilized from his bag of tricks are tracking shots, freeze frames, fast zooms, and close-ups. Ah, the close-ups -- no doubt they're references to Sergio Leone's style of filmmaking, here held several times to Leone's dramatic lengths. The impatient viewer who cares about moving the story along may get annoyed, but for the rest of us, it's oh-so-savory.

On top of everything, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 retains a distinct (and, might I say, Japanese-influenced) perspective on the business of revenge. Those who have been calling the movie "simplistic" have missed a detail. In most movies about good guys and bad guys, the bad guys are clearly evil, so when revenge happens, we the audience feel nary a bit of remorse. In this movie, we get details about the major bad guys -- one of them has a little daughter, and another one saw her parents murdered, motivating her to seek vengeance. The would-be victims of the rage of Thurman's character are fleshed out just enough to give weight to that line about revenge being served cold -- it must be served cold, or the vengeance-seeker will falter. But knowing just a little more about the adversaries gives us in the audience just enough reason to feel some remorse. Revenge is given its correct perspective -- it's easy to declare, but it isn't easy getting there, nor is it necessarily easy in the going-through-with-it.

I hope this aspect of Kill Bill is continued when "Volume 2" comes to town. Yes, it is indeed frustrating that the movie stops where it does. But I think of it this way: sometimes, when I watch a movie, about halfway through I'll think, "Were this movie to keep up what it's delivered so far, I'd give it this rating." Well, at the point where Vol. 1 ended, I felt it was on its way to being a 10-out-of-10 movie. Thus, my rating is a "conditional 10/10." While Kill Bill is definitely not for the squeamish -- with all the limbs and heads getting chopped off and blood gushing out as if from a broken fire hydrant (even in the animated sequence), it's quite hyperbolically blood-tacular -- I can easily say it's the most fun I've had watching a movie in a theater in a while. It's a movie of confident, professional showmanship; it uses the screen as a conduit to directly transfer the enthusiasm its creator feels to the audience, delivering giddy energy. It's too bad it ended where it did, because I could have watched another hour-and-a-half of it on the spot.

©Jeffrey Chen, Oct. 13, 2003

Home | Feedback welcome