I admit, I am not a Quentin Tarantino fan. I appreciate his skill as a storyteller and the quality of his films but can honestly say I have only ever enjoyed “Pulp Fiction” and “Django Unchained,” and those with some caveats.
Despite this and having never seen “Kill Bill Vol. 1” (2003) or “Kill Bill Vol. 2” (2004), I decided to watch the re-release of the films as “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.”
After all, the movies have woven themselves into the country’s cultural consciousness. Even someone like me, who knew nothing of the plot, was familiar with the image of Uma Thurman clad in a yellow tracksuit, and the gallons of blood the films splashed across the screen.
So, on the night it hit theaters, I grabbed my overpriced popcorn and soda, found a seat and settled in for the four-hour-35-minute film. For those who have not seen the original movies, you’ve had 22 years and I apologize, but there will be spoilers.
As I said previously, I admire Tarantino’s mastery at storytelling. The first scene of the film sets the viewer’s expectations without divulging any of the story. A closeup of a barely recognizable Thurman, laying bloodied and bruised on the floor. The voice of our unseen villain, sinister in its calmness, explaining that killing her is not an act of sadism, but masochism. A gunshot as the screen cuts to black.
From that moment, I knew the film’s characters were ruthless and that there would be no happy endings. More on that later.
The story is a love letter to the samurai films of the 1950s and 60s. Obviously, swords are the primary weapons used in the film, but the reverence for the genre is apparent in the choreography of the fight scenes, the framing of the closeups and the pacing of the scenes, following a frenetic fight with a moment of quiet of levity.
The film is told out of chronological order, in chapters that focus on each of the people the protagonist — known only as The Bride for the first half of the movie — seeks revenge upon. I am entirely comfortable with flashbacks and scenes shown out of time when it benefits the storytelling. However, I found myself asking, why this scene now? And I am of the belief that if you’re asking questions about the filmmaking during the first watch, the movie has failed at its most basic task: engrossing the viewer. Nonetheless, I found that I mostly enjoyed the individual chapters. I’ll leave the wisdom of their presentation order up to others to decide.
Thurman as The Bride, whose name is later disclosed as Beatrix Kiddo, is well-cast as the world’s best assassin. She carries herself through the fight scenes without ever looking like her movements are choreographed. Her acting took a back seat to the action in most of the film. However, there is one scene in which her performance was haunting. Waking up from a coma after being shot, Beatrix is horrified to find a steel plate in her head and the baby she was pregnant with is gone. Sobbing, crying out in grief, she is immediately confronted with the knowledge that she has been repeatedly raped while in the coma. Her pain and anger are palpable.
Now to the heart of my qualm with the movie. The blood. The gratuitous, incredibly fake-looking blood that jets out from severed limbs and sprays in every direction. I can hear fans of the movies now, “You just don’t understand. It’s part of the art. It’s intentionally campy.” I refer you back to the most basic task of a movie. I want to be transported into the world of a film and the lives of its characters. Instead, I found myself impatiently waiting for the blood to stop spurting so we could get on with the story.
The one scene that earned its gore was the fight between Beatrix and Lucy Liu’s character, O-Ren Ishii. In the climax of the first half of the movie, after Beatrix has single-handedly killed or maimed every member of O-Ren’s army of assassins, the two women fight in a quiet garden against the backdrop of crisp white snow. Beatrix’s killing strike slices off the top of her opponent’s head and seconds tick by as O-Ren realizes that she has been killed.
While the first half of the film relies heavily on the sword fighting and bloodshed, the second half relaxes into the story and we see Beatrix’s history, how she came to be trained as an assassin, her relationship with the titular Bill and why she was betrayed.
The last scenes of the movie left me bothered. Having enacted revenge against the league of assassins who turned on her and killed her one-time lover and boss, Beatrix is rewarded and reunited with her child. As they smiled and watched cartoons together, I couldn’t help but feel that Beatrix did not earn her happy ending. Yes, she suffered terrible injustices, and the audience is expected to root for her, but we have come to learn that she enjoys killing. She is not a hero who defeats the bad guy and saves the day. There are no heroes in the world Tarantino built, only killers and The Bride.
