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Quentin Tarantino Review Day Four

Published

11 years ago

January 5, 2016

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Shogun Wedding

♦ With the release of Hateful Eight in the UK on 8 January, we thought we would take another look at the previous seven films of Quentin Tarantino. It’ll be one per day, and today is the turn of his fourth film, Kill Bill Vol.1, released back in 1997.

Kill Bill Vol.1

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Stars: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu

Although Tarantino had three impressive films under his belt when Kill Bill Vol. 1 was released, it had been six years since Jackie Brown. There was no denying the ambition of Tarantino when he announced that his next film would be in two instalments. Sadly Kill Bill was the first example of Quentin Tarantino’s reach exceeding his grasp. Kill Bill is the story of killer-for-hire The Bride (Uma Thurman) waking up from a four year coma and subsequently seeking her revenge on her former boss, Bill (David Carradine) and his group of international assassins.

I have decided to review Vol.1 and Vol.2 separately because, although they are obviously connected, they are different films in terms of tone and approach. Vol.1 is a love letter to the martial arts movies that Tarantino loved, plus its main gimmick is that it’s broken up into a series of scenes all shot in a different way. The fact that Vol.1 is basically a giant pastiche of the movies and styles that the director admired makes it uneven and flawed. Kill Bill Vol.1 does look amazing in places and the director’s visual flourish is still in evidence here, but where its three progenitors were very much character pieces, Kill Bill Vol.1 is simply a series of beautifully shot and directed acts of cartoon violence. The animated sequence where we learn the origin of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) doesn’t sit well with the rest of the film and the fact that Tarantino tried to shoehorn in so many different styles of filmmaking means that the film has no cohesion to it.

Thurman is decent as The Bride but the rest of the cast are just cardboard cyphers for the director to play out his martial arts fantasies. There is a definite sea change with Kill Bill, with very few memorable lines in the film compared with his three previous efforts. During the fight between The Bride and O-Ren which ends the film, O-Ren says to her adversary: “Silly Caucasian girl likes to play with Samurai swords.” Kill Bill feels like a white American film director trying to ape the tropes of a Far Eastern martial arts movie and failing. Visually it is dynamic but lacks any real substance or character development. There is a feeling of self-indulgence here that was absent in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown. Kill Bill Vol. 1 sadly does see Quentin Tarantino merely going through the motions with a wasted cast and a flimsy script.