Watching Kill Bill Vol. 1 begs the inevitable question: just what have film buffs been doing without Quentin Tarantino for the past six years? Once again, the famed indie director presents us with a film that is extremely violent, but artistic in its presentation, and ultimately the coolest film you’ve seen since his own Pulp Fiction.
The story begins in flashback, with the bloodied figure of The Bride (Uma Thurman) as she talks to her former boss and lover, the infamous Bill. When Bill puts a bullet in her head and leaves her for dead, the action commences. Four years later, The Bride awakes and seeks revenge on her former comrades in the infamous VIPER gang, (Lucy Liu, Darryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and Vivica A. Fox) for the role they played in gunning down her entire wedding party. From here the propulsive force of The Bride’s will to finally get satisfaction carries her through the twists and turns of the plot.
The most impressive thing about the movie is the way that Tarantino manages to filter the recognizable images and symbols from the last 20 years of popular film into a single, brilliant narrative thread. As The Bride moves through the chain of figures that she needs to kill in order to gain redemption, each episode acts as a tribute to the original source material, all of which reads like a love letter from the biggest fan ever.
The greatest scene in the movie is the House of Blue leaves sequence (which took a week less to shoot than all of Pulp Fiction). Wearing the yellow tracksuit of Bruce Lee’s Game of Death, Thurman slices her way through O-Ren Ishii’s Crazy 88 gang, and her personal mace-wielding bodyguard Go-Go, to finally confront O-Ren (played by Lucy Liu) herself. The scene is close to half an hour in length and is not only brilliantly choreographed by the world’s greatest practitioners (swordsman Sonny Chiba, and the legendary Wo-Ping), but it is also possibly the bloodiest battle ever rendered on screen. The violence is not strictly excessive-in the director’s hands it becomes more than a tribute to Hong Kong and Japanese B-movies, and something beyond mere pastiche. Rather, it seems that Tarantino has somehow synthesized every movie he’s ever liked into a single film, while remaining true to the cinematic idiosyncrasies we’ve come to expect of him.
However, without Uma Thurman’s deep reservoir of talent, the film would not be as effective. Playing far from type, Thurman is the film’s emotional anchor, her quest for revenge rooted in a deep sense of loss, not only for her former life, but also for her unborn baby. Thurman’s dedication to the role shows not only in the extensive training she underwent to prepare for the film, but also in the authenticity of her own wire stunt work and swordfighting skills. The actress also walks a fine line in the film, balancing having to convey a deep-seated pain as well as a cold-blooded thirst for revenge.
Kill Bill Vol. 1 is an outstanding film-once again, Tarantino raises the bar for his inevitable imitators while serving up a tasty appetizer for next February’s Kill Bill Vol. 2.
