Kill Bill, Volume 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
Volume 1 of Quentin Tarantino’s bisected Kill Bill is at once less than I hoped, and better than I feared. Tarantino’s first three full-length films – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown – were amongst the best films of the last decade, but the possibility loomed that Kill Bill would favour all his worst instincts. Tarantino’s stated intent was a large-scale tribute to Asian exploitation movies, and the danger with such a project was that it would leach the substance from his work and leave only the sensationalism. After all, there was the clear precedent of his 1996 collaboration with Robert Rodriguez, From Dusk Till Dawn. That film was a tribute to lurid horror movies, and while cleverly done, it’s also a rather unpleasant and barren film. I feared Kill Bill would follow that pattern.
While the final verdict on Kill Bill would have to wait until Volume 2 is released early next year, Tarantino has already given us something much more than the empty vessel I anticipated. Which is not to say that this is a perfect film: far from it. Kill Bill is a strange and confounding picture, rambling all over the place, but with sequences of such brilliance that it cannot be dismissed easily. In Tarantino’s 90s films, you could always feel his sense of intoxication with the possibilities of the medium: Kill Bill finds him drunk and bouncing on the bed. The discipline of his earlier movies is lost in the mayhem, but at the same time he also moves into a delirious world of pure cinema that his other films did not approach.
The very fact that the film extended to a running time exceeding three hours, necessitating its splitting into two parts, has already fueled the mandatory anti-Tarantino backlash, here manifesting in criticism that the director has become outrageously self-indulgent. The unusual form of Tarantino’s possessory credit – “The 4th film by Quentin Tarantino” – adds to the sense of hubris that undeniably clings to the whole enterprise. Yet if, as I expect, the next Volume in Tarantino’s saga carries the same credit without renumbering, it might simply be taken as his defiant reminder that this is one movie. Certainly the splitting into two volumes is not as unusual as some would make out: very similar arrangements have been made with regards to the Matrix, Back to the Future and Lord of the Rings trilogies. While the decision to separate Volumes 1 and 2 of Kill Bill was made later in production than was the case in those examples, the film’s robust dramatic structure, and its immensely effective cliffhanger, suggest Tarantino had this possibility in mind from early on (Kill Bill feels much more self-contained and better resolved than The Matrix Reloaded).
The bare-bones story has The Bride (Uma Thurman) hunting down her former colleagues in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and extracting revenge for their (as yet unexplained) slaughter of her entire wedding party. Two of her “death list five” are hunted down in this installment: the remaining three, including the still-unseen Bill, will presumably follow in Volume 2. The simple story is a vehicle for extremely elaborate fight scenes, most notably a showdown between The Bride and dozens of members of the Japanese underground. Tarantino has said his aim was to produce the greatest fight scenes ever seen in an English language film. This stretch for “definitiveness” in action sequences is something we have seen a lot of lately: films such as the Matrix trilogy and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon have implicitly shared Tarantino’s goal of taking genre material and doing it better (or at least on a grander scale) than anyone else has done it before. This arms race of filmic spectacle inevitably starts to show diminishing returns after a while, and I suspect audiences will feel somewhat jaded during Volume 1’s admittedly well-staged final showdown. (It probably doesn’t help that Tarantino, Lee, and the Wachowski Brothers all turned to the same martial arts choreographer, Yuen Woo-Ping.)
What saves Kill Bill from being an empty genre tribute is Tarantino’s mastery of cinema and the headiness his pleasure in his subject brings to the film. Tarantino’s uncanny grasp of technique is as sure-footed as ever, and the film looks gorgeous, shifting styles to suit its different chapters. As is customary for Tarantino, the film is told out of order, and while the shuffled chronology is less of a feature here than in the earlier films, the shifts in tone between segments are much more extreme. One “chapter” is told in anime: it might have sat uncomfortably, but it’s arguably the best sequence in the film (it’s a sign of Tarantino’s talent that he knew this would work). Another features Sonny Chiba as the master swordsman that The Bride seeks out before embarking on her quest for revenge, and it is in this segment that Tarantino most deftly balances his portentous genre dialogue with humour. The musical selections are even better than in his previous films: Tarantino has always had a talent for using songs to provide ironic or dramatic counterpoint, but here the selections (and original music by RZA) function as a lively and nearly seamless score.
Reading other reviews on the internet, I have been struck by how totally some have fallen for this film. Tarantino’s films and characters have always had a studied aura of “coolness” about them: this is a dangerous game because the trip from edgy independent filmmaking to mainstream success is almost guaranteed to make a director’s work seem passe. The more a director stakes a claim to coolness, the more others will make a point of being too hip to enjoy their work. Look at the way the filmgeeks such as Harry Knowles turned on The Wachowski Brothers on the release of The Matrix Reloaded; for that matter, look at the constant snide carping from some quarters at even Tarantino’s best films. So it’s something of a miracle that Tarantino has kept so many on side with this film: while it has not received universal praise, clearly many have found it irresistible. It didn’t work quite that magic on me (I think it’s Tarantino’s weakest film thus far). But it is also his most unusual, challenging, and in some ways most ambitious film, and I have a feeling I will like it more having seen Volume 2. After all, would anyone have really liked just the first half of Once Upon a Time in the West?