Nearly a decade after Pulp Fiction and a full five years after his last film,
Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino, onetime wunderkind of American movies, has finally returned to the big screen. The result is
Kill Bill Vol. 1, a bare-(knuckle)-plotted
revenge epic, a movie so massive it had to be split in two, with
Vol. 2 due next spring.
Pulp Fiction star Uma Thurman returns to Tarantinoland as the Bride, nine-months pregnant on her wedding day, shot in
the head and left for dead, the rest of the wedding party a lifeless pile of bloody bodies around her. The culprits responsible for
this massacre are the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS), a band of comely assassins (Vivica Fox, Darryl Hannah, and
Lucy Liu) with a rough-looking male colleague (Michael Madsen) and a mysterious Charlie-like leader (David Carradine).
The Bride survives the attack and awakens from a coma four years later, then sets out on a journey to seek revenge from
her attackers, one by one. That’s the movie, and it’s tempting to read it meta-style, with Tarantino awaking from his own artistic
coma to extract a pound of flesh from his cinematic imitators.
Ever the excitable video hound, Tarantino indulges another genre homage with
Kill Bill. What Reservoir Dogs was to
the heist film and Jackie Brown was to blaxploitation
(Pulp Fiction was a genre homage of sorts too, but it contained multitudes),
Kill Bill is to the chop-socky and grindhouse fare Tarantino soaked up as a child. But in some ways,
Kill Bill is a regression. Where the subtle, underappreciated
Jackie Brown witnessed Tarantino finding a way to deploy his movie-mad, reference-heavy style to
the service of dealing with real people and real emotions,
Kill Bill is a return to the relatively cold mechanics of
Reservoir Dogs.
Instead of pushing in any new directions that
Jackie Brown may have hinted at, Tarantino instead serves up a dish of
cinematic comfort food. There is an air of familiarity here, with
Kill Bill something of a Tarantino greatest-hits package: The
DiVAS are surely an intentional reference to
Pulp‘s fictional Fox Force Five; the unearthing of
Kung Fu star Carradine (who makes only a shadowy appearance in
Vol. 1 as Bill) is a reclamation project on a par with Tarantino’s previous rescues of John Travolta and
Pam Grier; a hospital worker and his buddy who take sexual advantage of comatose women rhyme with the pawnshop sleazebags
in Pulp Fiction and receive a similar comeuppance; and then there’s the matter of Uma Thurman’s feet, which got Tony Rocky
Horror thrown from a high-rise in Pulp
Fiction and now get loving, lingering close-ups (which makes one wonder just which kind of
pulp paperbacks Tarantino gets his kicks from).
Kill Bill also exhibits the same love of structure that you see in Tarantino’s other movies, this “volume” divided into
“chapters.” The narrative here is chopped up and rearranged à la
Pulp Fiction, and though it’s easy to follow and has the same utility
in teasing out information (setting up an odd fact — such as Thurman’s character driving a yellow truck emblazoned with the
logo “Pussy Wagon” — only later to reveal its origin), the structure of
Kill Bill isn’t quite as elegant, failing to deliver the almost
musical satisfaction that you get from Pulp
Fiction.
But there is one key element of the Tarantino style that takes a hit: Tarantino’s pop-culture-inflected dialogue, for all
the sorry imitators it inspired, may be his greatest asset (remember: the character Tony Rocky Horror never actually appears in
Pulp Fiction but nearly a decade later the name still springs immediately to mind), and the talk pours out of his earlier movies with
a snap and verve that Kill Bill lacks. In
Kill Bill, those centerpiece conversations are replaced by fight scenes, and something
is definitely lost in the trade-off.
Fans may miss that glorious chatter, but the action sequences in
Kill Bill convey what a gifted and witty technician
Tarantino remains. One welcome surprise is “Chapter III — The Origin of O-Ren Ishii,” an extremely effective anime sequence that
also serves as a transition into the film’s final stretch, a revenge trip to kill Liu’s O-Ren, who is currently head of the Japanese
underworld, where she is backed by a pretty, insolent young bodyguard in Catholic-schoolgirl get-up and a band of thugs (who
wear masks à la the Green Hornet’s sidekick Cato) called the Crazy 88s. This culminates in an insane battle scene at a club called
the House of Blue Leaves, where all-girl Japanese garage-rock band the 5, 6, 7, 8s kick out the jams as the body count builds.
While this epic, climactic battle will get more attention, an earlier conflict between Thurman and Vivica Fox in a
sun-dappled suburban California kitchen (this could be the same house Tarantino’s own
Pulp Fiction character inhabited in that
film) may be a truer testament to the director’s skills. The scene’s unexpected burst of violence and a denouement that moves
swiftly from comic shock to trembling disquiet is a compact testament to Tarantino’s editing, timing, sound design, and framing. And
the same whiplash transition from humor to sadness comes through when the Bride awakens from her coma and first reaches up
to check her gunshot wound and finds a steel plate (you can hear the comic ping as she taps her forehead) and then reaches down
to her womb, where she collapses in sobs.
Kill Bill confirms Tarantino as the perpetual poster boy for Peter Pan syndrome, a return to the toy room after
Jackie Brown‘s stab at maturity. I suspected as much and thought I’d be disappointed by it. But
Kill Bill is also a reminder of how
talented a filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is. It’s good to have him back.
— Chris Herrington