Kill Bill: Volume 1
The worst thing about the first Quentin Tarantino picture in five years is that after 93 minutes of some of the most luscious violence and spellbinding storytelling you're likely to see this year, ''Kill Bill'' ends.
Anyone breathless to learn how the Bride (Uma Thurman) does, indeed, kill Bill, her wicked groom, has to wait until February. So, dear Miramax and Quentin Tarantino: hiss. ''Kill Bill,'' which opens nationwide today, is actually ''Kill Bill Vol. 1'' and Tarantino, who wrote and directed this pulse-quickening martial-arts magnum opus, decided somewhere during the production to split the film comic-book-style into a two-part serial -- thus leaving 'em wanting more.
''Vol. 1'' is broken into five chapters and told out of sequence. The effect is less surprising than it was in ''Pulp Fiction,'' where Tarantino messed with temporality to create a karmic cosmos colored by sin and redemption. ''Kill Bill'' uses time as an instrument to ratchet up the suspense.
The story is simple and sad enough. A woman whom Tarantino calls the Bride is shot by her husband (David Carradine, heard but never fully seen) and bludgeoned by his four assassins -- Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, and Michael Madsen. Quite pregnant and on her wedding day, too! Bill puts a bullet in her head, leaving her as carrion, but somehow she wakes up hospitalized from a coma four years later, her baby dead, a metal plate in her skull, and night after night of a nurse letting strangers molest her in
bed. This movie is a country song expanded into a bellicose adventure in retribution -- Bobbie Gentry righteously dropped into ''Enter the Dragon.'' Thurman, for her part, is game to be dragged through the bowels of hell. Her gritty, physical performance is balanced with a comedienne's wit. The only conventional thing about her character is Tarantino's dopey decision to keep track of her kills via a to-do list -- as if she'd forgotten what the movie is called. It was silly 35 years ago when wronged and murderous Jeanne Moreau was crossing names off her list in Francois Truffaut's ''The Bride Wore Black,'' a lark whose revenge plot seems polite by Tarantino's standards. Two electric brawls bookend the film. ''Kill Bill'' more or less opens with the first, a knock-down, drag-out waltz between the Bride and the wonderfully named Vernita Green (Fox), one-fourth of Bill's Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS). Choreographed with precise brutality by Yuen Wo-Ping and edited with breakneck glee by Sally Menke, it's a street fight set in Vernita's suburban Los Angeles living room: coffee tables and good china demolished; family portraits smashed out of their frames.In a classic Tarantino moment, Vernita and the Bride viciously eye each other on opposite sides of a window, through which we see a school bus pull up and a little girl get out, walk up to the door, and enter the house. It's Vernita's daughter, and the ladies, coated in blood, sweat, and broken glass, stash their cutlery behind their backs and pretend for the kid's sake to be old girlfriends.It's hard to think of another sequence that combines irony, suspense, dread, comedy, surrealism, violence, and swollen faces with as much stupefying zest as the one Tarantino has concocted. Hong Kong action pictures are renowned for these sorts of absurdist scenarios, but ''Kill Bill'' pushes the absurd to the brink of horror by having it operate according to recognizable moral boundaries: no stabbing in front of the kids. Yet, in spite of those guidelines, children play a consciously disturbing role in the picture, subjected to adult violence, always without warning.The person most defined by a destructive childhood legacy is O-Ren Ishii, the DiVAS member the Bride has flown to Japan to kill. Her back story is told partly as a deadly-serious interlude of subtitled Japanese animation that explains how a little girl became the unlikely queen of the Tokyo underworld: by avenging her father's murder. The passage communicates the grisly soul of great anime and Japanese comic books. It's not a superfluous touch, either. It's the most graphic sequence in the film, cleverly taking what, as live action, would be essentially unfilmable (killer 11-year-olds and whatnot) and still finding ways to make the conflict both harder to watch and more resoundingly human than the flesh-and-bone material that surrounds it.The sword fight showdown between the adult O-Ren, played by a fantastic Liu, and the Bride occupies the last third of ''Kill Bill.'' And to divulge much about it would just be rude. Just know that the Bride first has to extinguish O-Ren's sizable retinue and that the ever-imaginative cinematographer Robert Richardson has outdone himself here. The sequence is a sort of ballet that unfolds in four distinct movements -- one of which is a disco bolero with the fighters silhouetted against panels of indigo light. It might be the most entertainingly ludicrous fight sequence ever filmed. Better than nearly any American director, Tarantino deploys the history of screen violence -- from slapstick foolery to utter doom -- to enthrall. In the film's opening line, Bill asks his blood-spattered bride, ''Do you find me sadistic?'' and Tarantino must be wondering if we think the same thing about him. The answer is yes. But he's also the movies' sadist laureate. His brand of violence has the uncanny ability to seduce without desensitizing you to pain. (Enough can't be made of how much of Thurman's performance is spent wincing and groaning.)
With these first 90 minutes of ''Kill Bill,'' Tarantino reinvents the American action flick, using his usual arsenal of allusions and verve to make pop art of cult schlock. The movie lifts Japanese-Hong Kong grind-house violence to a rare operatic territory, without putting the martial-arts genre and the samurai flick out of business. He's fused them into a single cinematic species. It has nothing mind-blowing to say about the human condition -- although his movies suggest that it's grim. For now, he's content to continue pouring his heart and soul into trash, making, with ''Kill Bill,'' the year's most important unimportant movie.
The resulting mongrel isn't just a blood bath, it's blood bathhouse, with sake-soaked references to carnage kings as diverse as Sonny Chiba, Sergio Leone, and Kinji Fukasaku. ''Kill Bill'' has more samples than 800 Costcos -- lord knows how many aisles you'd have to walk down to taste them all. You'll have plenty of time to try, though. February seems a light year away. Apparently, the Bride's revenge can wait. But can you?
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