Even if it weren't completely obvious before, Kill Bill — Vol. 1 should erase all doubts that a Quentin Tarantino movie is, first and foremost, simply a playground for the director's own amusement. No, make that a toy store, one with long, wide aisles crammed top to bottom with all the cool stuff in the world.
And by cool stuff, I mean all the stuff that Quentin himself finds cool. If those of us in the audience happen to find some of that stuff cool too, that's simply a perk.
Tarantino's been parading all these cool toys throughout his career, in the form of scads of cinematic influences incorporated into everything he's touched, from Reservoir Dogs on. In the new Tarantino movie, however, the cool influences are no longer merely influences; they're the whole show. With Kill Bill, the toys have taken over.
According to Tarantino himself, Kill Bill takes place in a "movie world," an alternate universe made up entirely of riffs from all the flicks the director's grooved on throughout the years. That may sound fairly similar to the sorts of movies that Tarantino's always made, but it's actually not. Jackie Brown, for instance, merely referenced blaxploitation films as a jumping-off point for an interesting story about more-or-less real people doing interesting, more-or-less real things. Kill Bill begins and ends with the references.
This is a movie-movie if ever there was one, all about pure, pulp sensation — the rush of the movies themselves. Kill Bill is a shrine to movies — a high-octane blend of mostly Japanese and Hong Kong chopsocky, with a little spaghetti western thrown in for good measure — with Uma Thurman as a pissed-off super-assassin, tooling around killing everyone who's done her wrong. There are a lot of genres floating around in Kill Bill, but it's essentially just your basic, universal revenge flick, albeit supersized.
Gone even are the elaborately clever monologues that originally made Tarantino's reputation. Kill Bill doesn't simplify or pare down that inventive, trademark dialogue so much as it annihilates it. After all, the writer-director seems to be saying, what's the use of all that pop culture-laced repartee when the movie itself is one big pop culture reference?
You can practically feel Tarantino restraining himself here, struggling to keep the clever chatter to a matter-of-fact minimum so that the movie-movie-ness of it all can speak for itself. It's as if the filmmaker is willing himself to disappear from his own film, submerging his personality and ideas before the sheer forward momentum of his visceral speedball of a movie. On the rare occasions that the dialogue is allowed to step out a bit, it's usually in the form of throwaway lines like "I'm Buck and I came to fuck" — idiotic-and-proud-of-it extensions of Pulp Fiction's "Zed's dead."
The movie has almost nothing to do with plot or character development and even less to do with logic or reality. Kill Bill is an exercise in excess, beginning with its opening shot of Thurman's character — known only as The Bride — being beaten to a pulp by the titular Bill and his Deadly Vipers assassination squad. Thurman gets a bullet in her head for good measure but doesn't die because this is a revenge flick and she's got lots of scores to settle.
Despite some fairly inconsequential flipping back and forth in time, Kill Bill is a basically straightforward, uncomplicated account of The Bride going about the business of eliminating all the super-creeps who tried to do her in. She doesn't quite get around to everybody, but presumably she'll deal with the remainder of her hit list in Kill Bill — Vol. 2.
Heads and arms are lopped off with great relish and on a truly astonishing scale, causing great geysers of blood to gush from every mutilated body. During the final 10 minutes of the film's soon-to-be-legendary House of Blue Leaves sequence — a brilliantly staged, nearly half-hour long movie-within-a-movie set in a psychotronic Japanese nightclub — the movie goes black and white on us as the screen fills with dozens and dozens of horribly mangled fighters. Odds are that the switch to b&w wasn't an aesthetic decision so much as a means to mitigate the impact of all that blood — to which the film becomes a sort of homage — and help Kill Bill avoid that dreaded NC-17 rating.
The movie is filled with more than just gore. There are some incredible sights and sounds here, mostly lifted directly from assorted Asian and Euro-cult sources, but first-hand knowledge of those sources isn't really required to appreciate what Tarantino's accomplished here. Kill Bill may have been designed with fan boys in mind (and since I'm one, I'll probably enjoy the movie more than most), but the bulk of the film should prove equally eye-popping and/or offensive to everyone. In any event, the legions of clueless film critics who rushed out of Kill Bill screenings to google Japanese and Hong Kong movies will soon be able to "explain" it all to us, so never fear.
As in all Tarantino films, the music choices are impeccable. The score is very '70s, very cool, and Tarantino achieves an unexpectedly potent frisson by layering lush spaghetti western themes over his extreme Asian imagery. Nancy Sinatra, Issac Hayes and RZA show up too, as does Bernard Hermann, whose Twisted Nerve theme is memorably whistled by a sinister, one-eyed Daryl Hannah, as she prepares to murder the comatose Bride.
There's an incredible amount of fun to be had here, provided you've got a strong stomach and don't expect the movie to add up to anything more than what you see on the screen. Kill Bill expands Tarantino's vision even as it dissolves it, giving us a movie that's all about the director's personal obsessions and influences, but nothing more. There's absolutely no attempt to fold those obsessions and influences into something greater, to put them to the service of a larger story.
It's as if Tarantino knows how much is riding on his hotly anticipated new film and has responded by simultaneously raising and lowering the stakes, creating a movie that's impossible to measure by the standards to which his other films have been held accountable. There is simply no story being told in Kill Bill, other than the story of a boy and his very cool toys. In the past, Quentin's been happy enough to revel in those toys. Now he's simply become invisible and disappeared into them.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2003.
