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Six years after once again striking gold (well, not in box office figures) with Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino, the bad boy of cinema himself, is back again, and this time with a vengeance...literally. Within the film's opening scenes, it is very apparent that Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is different from Tarantino's other films. While his past three efforts all achieved success through a deft mix of clever dialogue, brilliant acting, and a visual flair relying on 70's crime movie sensibilities, Vol. 1 is a film consisting of corny lines, a crazy freewheeling camera, and buckets of blood. Though in the hands of some other filmmaker, it may have been a poor attempt at homage, in Tarantino's hands, it's masterful. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 also doesn't have much of a plot which, I guess, is true for Tarantino's other films. Vol. 1 is all about the Bride (Uma Thurman), whose name is bleeped out, and who, four years ago, left her lover/boss Bill's (David Carradine) ring of assassins know as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (D.i.V.A.S...get it?) when she found out that she was pregnant with Bill's baby. So, when the Bride is at her wedding, Bill comes a-gunnin', leaving the rest of the D.i.V.A.S. (Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, and Michael Madsen) to the task of slaughtering the entire wedding procession, except for the Bride...whom Bill does in himself with a cap to the skull. However, he wasn't so successful. The Bride's a fighter, and, four years later, when she wakes up from her coma with her baby gone, she's more than a little angry. This propels her on a globe-spanning, bloodletting journey to kill those responsible. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Quentin Tarantino has outfitted the project with his wild visual sense, and, though he skimps on the story, he provides just enough material to keep the action going...and trust me when I say that there's plenty of it. The film also doesn't take itself completely seriously, which proves to be very beneficial. Uma Thurman does an excellent job of bringing the Bride to life, enacting moments of hilarity and excitement as well as heartbreaking drama (proof that she should've won the Best Actress Oscar lies within the scene where she wakes up at the hospital and realizes that her baby is gone). David Carradine is magnificent even though his face is never onscreen, evoking a menacing air that takes on a menace of a different nature in Vol. 2. Lucy Liu finds the perfect balance between ferocity and beauty, and here gives what has to be the best performance in a career otherwise highlighted by Charlie's Angels. ,br> In essence, Kill Bill is the opposite of Tarantino's other works, which, besides Jackie Brown, include Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Those films were talky (albeit wonderfully, amazingly, brilliantly talky) and with long lulls in between action. Kill Bill is action-centric with long periods between meaningful dialogues. But this is part of the homage to the cheesy yet lovable 70's kung fu films that were so important to Tarantino's youth. Without much character development and talk, it could be said that Vol. 1 is yet another long-winded, mind-numbing action flick. But it achieves what few other action movies do in this day and age: It conveys its humor, character, and emotion through its action. The film is brimming with hilarious moments of erupting blood geysers, and though we don't get to know the Bride much in this first chapter, we can understand her basic primal rage and sympathize with it...it oozes through the celluloid. Tarantino fills the picture with glorious, blood-spattered love notes to the movies he grew up with, sometimes piecing together entire sequences from them, all the while infusing it with his own trademark brand of quirky, self-referential humor with 1970's pop bubblegum designs. Astonishing fight sequences are littered throughout, in which Tarantino uses black-and-white, subtle light and shadow techniques, and other tricks. The final chapter, entitled "Showdown at House of Blue Leaves" is a breathless, adrenaline-pumping, manic masterwork that is sure to be one of the greatest cinematic moments of this decade. Vol. 1 is much more than a B-movie; it transcends its cheesy genre roots and becomes a spectacular action flick that is vivid and colorful, and is really, truly alive unlike anything else out there. Tarantino has crafted just what he set out to craft: An epic kung fu slaughterama for the 21st century. --Courtesy of REELPICKS.CJB.NET-- email this review to a friend
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