I thought I had Quentin Tarantino figured out. I’ll grant that I haven’t seen his entire filmography yet, but I thought I had a pretty good handle on him after Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and Inglourious Basterds. I knew the guy had a foot fetish, I knew he was a bigger pop culture nerd than I could ever be if I had three lifetimes of movie blogging and most importantly of all, I knew that Tarantino was a master of tension.
It doesn’t matter if the scene is just two people talking or two people fighting, Tarantino can have the scene written, shot and edited (RIP Sally Menke) in a way that’s bursting with tension. Furthermore, I’ve seen Tarantino frequently use out-of-sequence storytelling to make a film even more suspenseful. Clearly, Tarantino is a guy who knows that uncertainty about how some inevitable thing is going to happen can be just as scary as uncertainty about a completely unknowable outcome.
Still, Kill Bill was enough to surprise me. It didn’t show me anything new in regards to Tarantino’s skills and shortcomings as a filmmaker, but their applications in this film took me totally off-guard.
We open our story with a massacre. Nine people in a small wedding chapel were brutally slain, one of whom was only a fetus. The pregnant lady was also The Bride of the wedding, who just happened to be a former assassin code-named “The Black Mamba.” Her old employer, the film’s namesake Bill, had commissioned the Bride’s former colleagues — code-named “Cottonmouth,” “Copperhead,” “Sidewinder” and “California Mountain Snake” (see a pattern?) — to slay everyone at the wedding. Unfortunately for them, The Bride turned out to be tougher than they had thought. Instead of killing her, a bullet to the head had somehow merely put her into a coma. She wakes up four years later, set on payback.
It’s a simple revenge story, but the film wastes no time in spicing it up. Immediately after the opening credits, we get a truly awesome fight sequence between The Bride and Copperhead. These two are such badasses that are so clearly determined to kill each other that their conflict carries over to the subsequent dialogue scene, underlining the exchange with palpable tension. Fifteen minutes in and I was completely hooked.
The script is sharply written. The editing is kinetic. The camera work has several shots that shouldn’t be technically possible. The tone borrows heavily from spaghetti westerns, samurai films and probably a few other genres I’ve never seen or heard of. The action scenes are incredibly heightened, using fountains of blood and bodily mutilations that I haven’t seen since my anime phase in high school. All of this blends together into a melange of fighting, humor and international pop culture references so stylized, creative, eclectic and fast-paced that it makes Scott Pilgrim look like Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
But then came the second half.
You see, I watched both of the Kill Bill movies back-to-back, doing my best to treat them as a single four-hour film. Unfortunately, the films are crafted in such a way that I kinda have to treat them as halves.
The first film is very much a spectacular. There are some talk-heavy scenes here and there, but the whole film moves at a very brisk clip and it’s flooded with awesome fight scenes. The second film, however, is more of a character drama. The fight scenes are few and far between, often ending in ways that could be considered anti-climactic. Moreover, there are several scenes and shots that were redundant or overlong (Sidewinder’s scene with his boss comes to mind).
The second half did have its stylistic flourishes, but the energy was so diminished that I found them less enjoyable. For example: Gogo the teenaged homicidal maniac uses a spiked ball on a chain in the first film. Why does she use such an impractical weapon when a blade or a gun would do? Because it’s a fucking awesome part of a fucking awesome fight sequence, that’s why! Compare that to the second film, when Bill utilizes a truth serum. It’s not cool, it’s not introduced during a particularly outlandish scene and it isn’t even entirely necessary. So now I’m left wondering how Bill came to develop this truth serum and why he’d bother to do so when outright killing is more his style.
The difference between the two films can be summed up thusly: When The Bride confronts Copperhead in the first film, they go at it tooth and nail with the unspoken guarantee that the melee doesn’t end until one of them is dead. When she confronts Sidewinder in the second film, he sedates her and buries her alive. In the former, we get to learn about the characters through dazzling and speedy action. In the latter, we learn about the characters through lengthy flashbacks and scenes of dialogue. They’re both effective, but doing the introspective stuff immediately after the razzle-dazzle comes off as kind of a letdown.
The long and short of it is that as a four-hour whole, it’s a film with pacing problems that climaxed far too early. There was absolutely nothing in the second film that came close to topping the “Crazy 88” fight, but that’s understandable: How could anything top the “Crazy 88” fight?!
Nevertheless, the film is technically amazing throughout. The camerawork, editing and writing are all of Tarantino’s usual standard. The acting performances are likewise amazing. I was especially fond of Lucy Liu’s bipolar yakuza boss, Daryl Hannah’s over-the-top villainess, Chiaki Kuriyama as the creepy-hot Gogo, Gordon Liu’s awesomely hilarious parody of a wise old sensei, and of course, the fearless and versatile performance from Uma Thurman.
The two halves of Kill Bill are two very different movies and that can take some getting used to. Still, these are both two films that absolutely merit watching and there’s no way to watch one without the other. I won’t try to hide the fact that I prefer Volume I, but that’s hardly a knock against Volume II. It’s just that one is good and the other is phenomenal.
The film is technically marvelous, made with great care and love for pop culture. Tarantino crafted something new and beautiful out of more references to TV, movies and animation than I could ever hope to find after a dozen viewings and hours spent online. I would call this film his masterpiece, but that’s what I said about Inglourious Basterds and I’ve still got some shrapnel left from when I said I preferred that movie over Pulp Fiction.
Nevertheless, I’ll still go on record and say that Kill Bill is more visually dazzling and more demonstrative of Tarantino’s filmmaking skill than either of those two films. Seek both volumes out if you already haven’t.