Kill Bill Vol One

From the Echo, first published Friday 17th Oct 2003.

AFTER all the hype, the interviews, the promotional giveaway DVDs, can Quentin Tarantino's fourth film really be that good?

O ye of little faith, of course it can.

Like some kind of cinematic sampler at work, Tarantino magpies movie styles and binds them together with microscopic attention to detail and his own searingly-vivid imagination.

Thus, spaghetti westerns meet Manga-house Japanese anime via gangster movies, revenge movies, martial arts movies and all kinds of exploitation flicks in Tarantino's most audacious work to date.

The story is also the simplest to date.

A pregnant female assassin is attacked by former colleagues on her wedding day and left for dead.

Four years later The Bride (Uma Thurman) awakes form her coma and sets about killing her attackers one by one, starting with the formidable Yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) and the athletic Vernita Green (Vivica A Fox).

It's that simple.

No clever cul de sacs, no entertainingly-pointless detours, there isn't even much evidence of Tarantino's sparky dialogue, it's just a simple story going inexorably in one murderous direction.

He's having more fun with the pictures this time rather than the words and the film's delights, as well as its jokes and reference points, are nearly all visual - a Brian de Palma split screen here, a Busby Berkeley montage there.

The film is presented episodically, segments broken up into chapters flagged on-screen.

Once again, Tarantino eschews conventional chronological story-telling in favour of a less obvious narrative thread but he knows he's got us hooked so he can do what he likes with the time frame.

Thurman carries the film magnificently, her economical performance even more noticeable as all around her are losing limbs, gushing torrents of blood, screaming, shouting and flailing wildly during a relentless - and beautifully choreographed - Samurai sword fight.

And despite the presence of Michael Madsen, David Carradine and Daryl Hannah (of whom we'll see more in Volume 2 when it comes out next year), Thurman's principal co-stars are Blood and Guts.

There is a lot of gore in Kill Bill.

An awful lot.

And it's great.

Like a live action Itchy & Scratchy, the brutal cartoon carnage is downright funny and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.

A supremely-cool soundtrack (obviously), superslick editing and great costumes complete a near-perfect cinematic experience.

Visually and stylistically mesmerising, Kill Bill Volume One has been well worth the wait.

See it at UCI, Odeon, ABC

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