Kill Bill

Quentin Tarantino, USA, 2004, minutes

The day after Kill Bill Vol. 1 came out, I stood in the Crags watching a rugby match with a hundred other people when I was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to attack everyone there with a samurai sword. Maybe I should have seen a doctor, but this was a feeling that I would suffer from regularly over the following months, and I still do occasionally. This is the impact that Kill Bill had on my life.

On the off-chance that anyone reading this doesn’t already know the plot of the most exciting film of 2003, Kill Bill is the story of The Bride, an assassin who, after quitting her job and trying to start a new life, is tracked down by her old comrades who, on her wedding day, kill the entire party, before her old employer, Bill, shoots her in the head. Four years later she wakes from a coma, desperate to take revenge by killing each of her assassination squad, and eventually to Kill Bill. Throughout the whole movie, Uma Therman displays a tangible anger at the wrong that was done on her, and her passion for revenge is the driving force behind the film.

After giving the movie-going world such unforgettable films as Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs (and the adjective “Tarantinoesque” almost immediately), there had been massive pressure on Quentin T. for almost six years to follow them up with something as good or better, and he was very aware of the expectations of his fans. Many people were then a little surprised when he gave them Kill Bill, as it lacks many of his most notable trademarks. “Where was the random chitchat about nothing that made Dogs so refreshing?” “The timeline was almost linear!” “And why has the whole of Hollywood decided that ‘episodic epic’ is the way of the future?” But these were all complaints that Vol. 2 would later make good on. Vol. 1 is, by Tarantino’s own admission, just pure adrenaline, and damn good adrenaline at that. Aside from a brief lull in the pace of the film about a third of the way through (just to fit some of the plot in there), this is basically an exercise in how many people can Uma Therman kill in increasingly stylish ways in 111 minutes, while finding out how many different genres QT can homage in one film. Film buffs can play “Spot the Tribute” while everyone can relish the sight of the finest fight scene of recent years. To be fair, it doesn't have the quality of Tarantino's early films, but it does have all of the cool, so it's best to shut off most intellectual expectations and just have fun, which is something you can't avoid.

I always used to believe that there were no bad films that featured either samurais or robotic ninja monkeys. Seeing Kill Bill Vol.2 for the first time made me doubt the wisdom of that statement.

Volume 2 is not Volume 1. The change of pace is immediately noticeable. This is the film with most of the plot (and the trade-mark Tarantino dialogue), and little of the on-screen killings. Once you have worked that out, you can enjoy it properly, as I did the second time I saw it. Here, you will find a lot of the backplot which was not essential to our enjoying of Volume 1, but which enhances Kill Bill as a whole, and which adds to, rather than detracts from, the coolness of the film. There are whole scenes that don’t tell us anything meaningful about the characters (e.g. the scene with Esteban) that you wouldn’t wish away because it is such a pleasure to watch Tarantino direct them.

Kill Bill is best watched in one long sitting, as we are screening it, so that you can see both sides of the story in one experience. This does make it rather long, but far better that than slicing out ninety minutes of material and releasing it as one film, so let’s just settle for “epic” rather than “long”. If, unlike me, you can immediately accept what Volume 2 is, it becomes the more interesting, and quite possibly the more cool, half of the film.

But I still really want a samurai sword…

Review by Rupert Good
Written for EUFS Programme Autumn 2004