Kill Bill: Volume 1 [2003]

A woman called ‘The Bride’ kills another woman called Vernita Green in her house and ticks her off a list. The Bride was once a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, elite assassins under the employ of Bill. Flashing back, she lies badly wounded at her wedding, telling Bill that she is carrying his baby as Bill shoots her in the head. She miraculously survives the headshot, but is left comatose for four years. When she wakes up, she not only finds she is no longer pregnant but has been repeatedly raped by hospital worker Buck and others from whom Buck has been excepting cash. She kills both her latest rapist-to-be and Buck, then steals his truck and sets off for revenge against the other Deadly Vipers…..
Still, the opening bits are amongst his best. After a really harrowing scene of the heroine horribly bruised and battered and then being shot by an unseen Bill, we launch into a great sequence of The Bride trying to kill her next target, who happens to have a young daughter coming home from school. An insanely brutal but still athletic fight where the combatants really look like they are getting hurt is
interrupted by the arrival of the little girl and the fighters making a cup of tea. This is Tarantino firing on all cylinders; there’s simmering tension, very black humour, interesting dialogue and bursts of shocking yet somewhat ironic brutality. This whole bit actually takes place after the events of the rest of the film, and Tarantino has said that you could shift the chapters around in various ways. Then we see how The Bride survived being shot in the first scene. Having her apparently repeatedly raped whilst in a coma feels like one gratuitously unpleasant touch too much, while for what is supposedly more than anything else a martial arts movie, we don’t get any more fighting till the final half an hour. The few really Tarantino-esque bits, especially the section where The Bride visits Chiba’s swordmaker, go on for too long considering Tarantino’s dialogue is generally less entertaining and quotable than in stuff like Pulp Fiction.
The marking of time before the climactic bloodletting does give us one amazing section [inspired by an Indian film Aalavandhan], when we are told about how O-Ren Ishii, The Bride’s main target, came to be. Done with animation, the nature of which is actually a little crude but somehow appropriate, the graphically bloody anime-inspired section is totally startling and truly disturbing, with the image of a young girl hiding under a bed having her dead mother’s blood drip onto her perhaps the most upsetting image Tarantino has yet put on screen. And the film’s final half hour remains a brilliant ballet of bodies, movement and lots and lots of the red stuff. Tarantino builds and builds up to the fighting, really playing with the audience, than lets rip. Masterfully edited in a manner which is midway between the ‘plonk the camera on the ground and run it’ method of old kung fu films and the faster cutting which has become excessive of late in cinema, and alternating from elaborate wirework to the more realistic kind of fighting, it’s breathtaking stuff, and cleverly makes each section different in various ways. And then the film stops….but of course we all couldn’t wait to see the second part, could we?
I’m no fan of Tarantino’s use of music, partly because, being a soundtrack fan, I tend to recognise too much and lose focus on the film. The music choices here, some, but not all, from other films, are the most diverse in style Tarantino has ever used and do usually go very well with the images. The very ‘easy-listening’ tune, replete with pan-flute, of The Lonely Shepherd by James Last, gives the making of Hanzo’s sword a certain exquisite beauty, while the instrumental portions of Santa Esmerelda’s song Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood enhance the suspense of the final face-off. Kill Bill: Volume 1 probably shows its creator’s love of cinema more than any other of his films. This limits as well as enhances the movie, but I think you would have to be a real Tarantino hater to find it, at times, quite exhilarating. And it also shows he’s absolutely superb at staging full-on action, especially kick-ass fight sequences. I hope he will one day make the traditional-style martial arts film he used to mention at times.