Kill Bill: Volume 1
Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film six years in the making seems to be the one that’s most like his personality: musically beautiful but on-screen, seriously twisted. Black Mamba (Uma Thurman) is all ready to be married with a child on the way, but the assassin group she just left has other plans for her, namely her death. While the whole wedding party is killed, Black Mamba falls into a coma after a bullet from the crime boss Bill (David Carradine, face unseen), grazes her head. Four years later, she awakens and lays the groundwork for her revenge on the five people that contributed to her attempted death.

Being Volume 1 of 2, she only gets to tackle two of the group, Vernita Green or Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox) and O-Ren Ishii or Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu). Green has settled down in the suburbs with a daughter of her own while Ishii has become crime boss of Tokyo. Both have intricate martial arts sequences lasting longer than 20 minutes in one case. In her heart though, Black Mamba knows she won’t be fully healed until she gets to Bill.

The music is very good, the best being from the trailer as well as in the movie “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” by Tomoyasu Hotei. The rest is a mix of Japanese Pop and cool beats with a little bit of Nancy Sinatra thrown in. The martial arts sequences are exceptionally good with maybe a little bit too much blood being spilled on the floor. Does the human body really spray that much blood into the air when you slice off a limb? But there’s a lot to digest in this film and I wish Tarantino could have made the effort to cut down a little of the film to make it more manageable to fit into one film instead of two and having us wait. But I can understand how much devotion a director has with a film and it would be hard for him to give up any of it, even at the expense of sitting there for 4 hours. Its length and the numerous devices to follow the plot (in a non-linear way, of course, using anime and black-and-white filming) along with a number of pop culture references (Star Trek and maybe even Star Wars if I heard the scene correctly, among others) buries the film’s message that could let us identify with the characters or figure out why this happened in the first place but I sure hope the second part can explain it all. And that Alias-style ending where the last line is meant to surprise didn’t really awe the audience at all. (Coincidentally, Tarantino guest-starred in two episodes on Alias.) As this incomplete film stands, it is one that stands for its coolness to attract people to its second feature and nothing else. 3 stars