KILL BILL--VOLUME 1 (2003)
A Band Apart/Miramax

By Désirée I. Guzzetta

Kill Bill--Vol. 1 is Quentin Tarantino's hyper-violent (in a mega-cartoony way) love letter to Hong Kong and spaghetti western grindhouse flicks that is filled with so much visual pizzazz and gung-ho action that it's easy to forgive him for the razor-thin plot. At least his trademark crackling dialogue is more or less intact, along with copious use of the F-word that might make David Mamet blush.

KBV1 is basically a revenge fantasy: A woman known only as "The Bride" (Uma Thurman in an Oscar-worthy, pitch-perfect performance) sets out to kill the former members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS) who murdered her entire wedding party, including her groom and unborn child, and put her in a coma for four years. She's making her "death list," checking it twice, finding out who's naughty and who's...well, no one's really nice in this tale of killer versus killers, though Thurman gives her icy assassin a sympathetic edge that encourages spectatorial identification.

The film is a little slow at the beginning, but it doesn't take long to find its kung-fu footing and start kicking tail all over the world. The Bride (code name: Black Mamba) starts off blood-splattered and ends that way in the first installment of this two-part saga, which was originally made as one long picture. Here, she takes on O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), code name: Cottonmouth, who has become the first female boss of the deadly yakuza, and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), code name: Copperhead, who has become the wife and mother denied The Bride. We're also introduced to Elle Driver (creepy whistler Daryl Hannah), code name: California Mountain Snake, and Budd (Michael Madsen), code name: Sidewinder. Looming over all is the notorious-but-unseen Bill (David Carradine), leader of the DiVAS and presumably, The Bride's final target.

Visually, the film is extravagant, whether soaking our senses in the bright hues of color-saturated goodness that is Copperhead's Pasadena neighborhood or drowning us in geysers of blood which make the Monty Python parody of Sam Peckinpah films seem tame in comparison. The mixture of wire and traditional martial arts, the jumping back and forth in time a la "Pulp Fiction," and the changing visual styles (including black/white and shadow) show that Tarantino has lost none of his audacity and flair. The anime sequence of O-Ren's origin is particularly stunning.

References to both Tarantino's own work and the work of those he admires permeate the story. One example: Hattori Hanzo (Sonny Chiba) is a character from the Japanese series "Shadow Warriors." The fight choreography of Master Yuen Woo-ping ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") is exquisite, even if there are limbs flying everywhere. Liu is extremely menacing as the super-assassin Cottonmouth, and Fox does well with her relatively short part. Also noteworthy are Chiba's samurai master Hanzo and Chiaki Kuriyama's scary teen-age psycho, Go Go Yubari (she's the one with the mace-as-yo-yo), one of O-Ren's guards. As appropriate to a two-parter, KBV1 ends in a whopper of a cliffhanger guaranteed to suck you back into the theater for Volume 2. As it is, I'm already itching to see KBV1 again...and again.

For a hip trip, check out http://www.kill-bill.com/

A Band Apart/Miramax
Written & Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Uma Thurman (The Bride), Lucy Liu (O-Ren Ishii), Daryl Hannah (Elle Driver), Vivica A. Fox (Vernita Green), Sonny Chiba (Hattori Hanzo), Chiaki Kuriyama (Go Go Yubari), Julie Dreyfus (Sophie Fatale), David Carradine (voice of Bill)
Running Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Rated: R

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