The movie follows a woman we know only as the Bride (Uma Thurman) as she seeks revenge on the people who beat her almost to death and then put a bullet in her head on the day of her wedding. Miraculously she survives and after waking from a four year coma, is looking for blood. This starts with a trip to suburbia to visit Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) and kill her. This is a scene I can only describe as tasteless and that's pretty bad coming from me. It actually succeeds in removing all sympathy for the Bride, something which makes much of what follows rather joyless. It wasn't until the climactic mega-battle in Japan where the Bride goes for her second (or is it first?) piece of revenge that I started to enjoy myself again.
The action is the main reason to see this movie and it does not disappoint. Highly stylized and so over the top that one has little choice but to giggle and snicker in response, the fights in this movie are top notch. Watching the Bride move like a buzzsaw through crowds of attackers sounds thoroughly gruesome but in practice it's somewhere between exciting and silly.
As you can tell from the title, Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is the first part of a longer movie. Why exactly is it two movies instead of one? Two theories leap immediately to mind. First is that Miramax wanted to make lots and lots of money so they split the movie in two to get viewers to pony up twice to see one movie. Considering the way that Hollywood follows the money, it's pretty hard to ignore that theory. A second theory is that Miramax feels a debt to writer/director Quentin Tarantino for what his previous movies did to build the studio. Under that theory they let him do it any way he wanted and what he wanted was to not leave out even a scrap of what he had written. The end result is a movie that is far too long to get serious attention at the box office. Either way, the reasoning behind splitting this movie is less than thrilling.
The main reason I bring this up is that as a stand alone film, Vol. 1 is rather incomplete. Details that would be eventually explained in the course of a single film are left hanging for months while we await the next installment. A proper story is not being told in this manner. We never see more than the hands of the title character or develop a real idea of who he is. We have no idea what was behind the act that set this entire revenge plot in motion. The result is an unfinished mess of a story that includes numerous scenes that do nothing to move things along. Do we really need an extended scene revolving around Uma Thurman's feet? Frankly the woman has some funky looking toes and I could do without staring at them quite so long. Do we really need a long sequence about getting a samurai sword from a master sword maker? It's good but does nothing to help along the story. It could easily have been edited out with no ill effect on the story. But that doesn't happen because said sequence contains the legendary Sonny Chiba's performance and there's no way QT cuts it. That's really my problem here. We get too much because Tarantino was unwilling to make cuts. It's possible (common even) to cut a film too drastically and damage the story and characters. But it is equally bad to cut too little and leave way too much up on screen. Check out P.T. Anderson's Magnolia for a prime example.
This is an amazingly violent movie and I suspect Tarantino was prepared for a battle with the MPAA's ratings board early on. The two most violent sequences are delivered in a manner that seems custom made for the peculiarities of the MPAA's ratings decisions. The big battle between the Bride and the Crazy 88 is shot in black and white, reducing the gore factor simply by not coating the screen in red blood. The sequence that depicts the history of O-Ren Ishii (was it really necessary?) is animated, something that makes the content seem less offensive. If you don't believe me, go check out the anime section at Blockbuster. There is stuff in there that Blockbuster wouldn't allow in any other section of the store. Because it's animated, it is somehow viewed as more innocent, regardless of content.
Basically I see this as a case of lackluster editing and predatory business decisions underming some genuinely wonderful filmmaking. This is not Tarantino's best film but it should please most of his die hard fans. Martial arts fans will be delighted with it. Everyone else is a crap shoot.
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