Kill Bill: Plenty of sizzle, not so much steak?
Posted on October 13, 2003 @ 12:47 pm
Note: I’m relatively sure that the following comments are about as spoiler-free as possible.
I caught a showing of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 over the weekend, and I have to say that I left the theater a bit underwhelmed. Admittedly, I went into the film with rather high expectations, and I certainly can’t find much fault in Tarantino’s directorial skills. There are no two ways about it: Kill Bill is a beautiful film. Tarantino clearly has an artistic flair for making incredibly complex shots work for him, and as far as I’m concerned, modern cinema doesn’t get much more gorgeous than the snowy showdown between Uma Thurman’s “The Bride” and Lucy Liu’s O-Ren Ishi.
That being said, the much-ballyhooed spraying, spurting, and splattering of blood that nearly earned the film an NC-17 rating didn’t work for me at all. It’s not so much that the pervasive violence bothered me per se, but rather that the outlandish lack of realism in the bloodshed itself just pulled me out of the experience and made it even more difficult to suspend my disbelief as I watched a single woman defeat literally dozens of adversaries in hand-to-hand combat. Still, I suppose that’s more of a stylistic complaint than a substantive critique.
What really disappointed me about Kill Bill was how empty–perhaps even vacuous–the film seemed between action sequences. In particular, Tarantino’s trademark dialogue is virtually absent throughout Vol. 1 (although I hear this problem is remedied in the second installment). Instead, viewers are left with the barest of plots to give “The Bride” an excuse to run around killing people with samurai swords. Speaking of “The Bride,” we’re given a handful of interesting characters in Vol. 1, but relatively little reason to care about–much less relate to–any of them.
When it’s all said and done, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is a movie about revenge and just revenge–not whether revenge is right or wrong, and not about the effect it has on the person seeking it. Maybe the next installment will touch on such themes and help add a bit of substance to the unquestionably stylish presentation of Vol. 1. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed Kill Bill. I’m just reserving judgment on whether the film is the instant classic that some critics have hailed it to be until I’ve seen the second installment. For the time being, however, Kill Bill strikes me as a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I guess we’ll know next February whether or not it was, in fact, told by an idiot.
Posted by Jess | Filed Under Pop Culture |
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is there some hidden fundamentally philosophical meaning behind films like Enter the Dragon or The Killer?
not really. flashy, gaudy, skeletal plot only meant to propell the action. i actually prefer a film like Kill Bill or the early John Woo films over an action movie that gets too talky like any of the latter-day arnold flicks. i.e. End of Days or the like where all the time spent explaining the trivial, patronizing, and idiotic plot could have been better spent blowing stuff up.
for what it is, an action movie designed for those with an attention span of nil, it succeeds admirably.
I enjoy seeing stuff blown up and people getting their heads chopped off as much as the next guy, but what I really missed in Kill Bill was the witty dialogue that made Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction such fun flicks. As I said in my original post, I enjoyed Kill Bill quite a bit. I’m just reserving judgment on whether or not it’s an instant classic until I’ve seen the whole thing.
Of course, that didn’t stop me from railing on it a bit in my blog.