Since Quentin Tarantino made a huge splash with \Pulp Fiction,"" he had only directed the Elmore Leonard adaptation ""Jackie Brown"" and one segment of the ill-conceived ""Four Rooms."" With Tarantino lying dormant, cheap knockoffs of his dark style, like Troy Duffy's hollow ""Boondock Saints"" and Roger Avary's miserable ""Rules of Attraction,"" failed, and more modest writer-directors like Wes Anderson came into vogue. Now, Tarantino has directed his first original script in nearly a decade in ""Kill Bill: Vol. 1"" and has done the unimaginable by exaggerating his already jarring style. The results are mixed.
""Kill Bill: Vol. 1"" is the first part of what was originally supposed to be one long movie, but Miramax decided to cut in half. It follows the story of Uma Thurman's unnamed character, a martial artist who was beaten and shot within an inch of her life on the day of her wedding. When she wakes up from her coma months later, she trains herself back into shape and seeks revenge on her former co-workers and boss, Bill (David Carradine), who brutalized her and killed the baby in her womb.
The most notable feature of ""Kill Bill"" is its violence. We have come to expect over-the-top violence from Tarantino, but ""Kill Bill"" makes ""Pulp Fiction"" look like ""Sleepless in Seattle."" He tempers the violence by using campy, old-fashioned gore effects, like those used in the classic Hong Kong films, to which he pays homage. But still, the level of violence is extraordinary. Decapitations and flying heads litter the movie. In one drawn-out sequence, we see Thurman's character kill dozens of her foes, all in one room.
What ultimately drags the movie down is how impulsive and uneven it feels. The excessive violence of the action sequences is not as problematic as how long the scenes drag on. And while the comedic elements of the movie are effective, they feel sporadic and are overused in conjunction with the violence. There are also a lot of parts that feel unnecessary, like a whole sequence drawn in Japanese anime that provides an excessive amount of background information on Lucy Liu's character.
""Kill Bill"" feels a bit like something Tarantino did just because he could get away with it. Is it good? Well, at moments it is astoundingly entertaining with plenty of great eye candy. The cliffhanger ending is effectively done and it was probably wise to cut the movie in half. On the other hand, it is weird to watch a revenge movie that has absolutely no emotion and there is plenty of fat that could have been trimmed.
""Kill Bill"" feels like Tarantino's equivalent of ""Gangs of New York"": epic and captivating, but not in the same league as his best work, unless you always think bigger is better. The second volume will likely be better, since Carradine and Michael Madsen are set up to tackle much larger roles in it. If nothing else, Tarantino has amazingly managed to create a fourth film for which nothing could have prepared us.
