| Quentin beats influences to a bloody pulp
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KILL BILL: VOLUME 1. With Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica Fox A. Fox, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah. Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Running time: 93 mins. Rated R: Strong bloody violence, language and some sexual content. You want blood? You can shower in it in "Kill Bill: Volume 1," a giddy and only occasionally brilliant homage to all the kung fu fighting, B-movies and spaghetti Westerns Quentin Tarantino scarfed down during his movie-centric adolescence. It's writer-director Tarantino's love of genre flicks and his will to cram in a little of everything that gets you through the rough spots of this uneven revenge fantasy - grandly billed as his "fourth film" after an absence of six years. But this long-awaited movie has been unwisely chopped into two pieces - the second is due in February - when it really needed to be one long, delirious ride. Uma Thurman barely has a chance to catch her breath as the protagonist, dubbed the Bride. She's a steely killing machine who was mowed down in late pregnancy along with her entire wedding party by the DiVAS (Deadly Viper Assassination Squad), her former gang. After this "Once Upon a Time in the West" opening, the Bride managed to hang on in a coma. When she springs back to life some years later, with not quite the potency of Thurman's resurrection in "Pulp Fiction," she's all about revenge, ticking her opponents off a to-do list as she visits the farthest corners of the globe to kill them. The action is presented in chapter form. One slugfest takes place in a suburban kitchen, with frying pans and kitchen implements as weapons. Another takes place in a snowy Japanese tea garden to the beat of flamenco. Meanwhile, there's an anime segment providing one character's backstory and a stopover for a deliberately obscure negotiation with Japanese martial arts legend Sonny Chiba, playing a retired samurai. What's cool is that Thurman speaks Japanese in several scenes, complete with English subtitles, just the way James Bond would in similar circumstances. The Vipers are played by Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and Vivica A. Fox. Each goes by a nom de snake (the Bride, for example, is also known as Black Mamba). Liu is allowed to have more fun than in "Charlie's Angels," while Hannah gets laughs merely from her outfit, one of many visual non sequiturs - a starchy nurse uniform with a red cross over a white eyepatch. Bill, played by an unseen David Carradine (of that TV chestnut "Kung Fu"), is the Vipers' leader. Presumably he will get his in "Volume 2." "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs" fans will be delighted with the in-jokes, gore, movie references, and chunks of flesh and brain splattering the walls. (For the record, I wrote the 1995 book "Quentin Tarantino: A Man and His Movies.") The humor in "Kill Bill" resides in those references, in the variations of intensity with which the blood spurts, and with the way the fight scenes, choreographed by Woo-ping Yuen and Chiba, both recall and one-up their sources. At the same time, the movie has no emotion beneath all this mirthless mirth. There's enough material to fuel an eternity of Trivial Pursuit, but no one to root for, nothing to take home - not even a good debate about Quarter Pounders - nothing really to keep the fires burning until "Volume 2." There's as little feeling as the Bride has in her stubbornly non-wiggling toes when she first awakens. There's a lot to admire in "Kill Bill," and a lot that should have been lopped off like the arms and legs and scalps that go flying. What this undoubtedly enthusiastic writer-director needed was someone who would just say no, be it an editor or Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein. |
