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In a yellow tracksuit borrowed from Bruce Lee’s
Game of Death, with a sword specially crafted for vengeance by another incarnation
of the legendary
multigenerational Samurai “Shadow Warrior” Hattori Hanzo (Sonny
Chiba), a
woman known only as The Bride (Uma Thurman) reaps a rather brutal revenge
on her former associates. It is with this concept that Quentin Tarantino’s Kill
Bill does for action cinema what his Pulp Fiction
did for noir — reinvent it!
Kill Bill, Volume 1 is a straight
revenge action flick cobbled together of retro cult images and an exaggerated homage to
everything from blaxploitation and spaghetti westerns to Hong Kong action and Japanese
yakuza gangster films — all with trademark Tarantino dialogue and temporally challenged
storytelling.
On her wedding day, The Bride is left for dead by the DiVAS
(Deadly Viper Assassin Squad), an elite team of professional killers led by Bill (David
Carradine). She awakes from a coma four years later in a hospital being pimped out by a
sleazy orderly and launches a slaughter-style killing spree, exacting her revenge one
target at a time.
Kill Bill is not about plot – it’s about
execution. We see The Bride’s kills out of sequential order, getting insightful
flashbacks on each character before the action explodes on-screen. First we’re shown a
brilliantly choreographed, wickedly comedic, hyperactive kung fu knife fight with second
kill Vernita Green (Vivica Fox). They pause the action for Vernita’s daughter to head
upstairs, they debate The Bride’s nickname, Black Mamba, in Reservoir Dogs style,
they speak in that awkwardly diplomatic, surreally polite Samurai way, and they kick the
shit out of each other.
Then we head to Okinawa, where we’re treated to a
pop-cultural Samurai Sunday rendition of ceremony and culture, compliments of Sonny Chiba
reprising his role of Hattori Hanzo from the Japanese television show, Kage No
Gundan. In the classic cult show, Chiba played generation after generation of classic
Samurais, each named Hattori Hanzo. Chiba, who is described by Tarantino’s mythologized
self, Clarence Worley, in True Romance as “.the finest actor working in martial
arts today,” teams up with Woo-ping Yuen of Matrix fame to
conduct the superb fight choreography.
In Japan, we get the story of
Chinese-American-Japanese yakuza boss and
former DiVAS’ member O-Ren Ishii (Lucy
Liu) in Anime cartoon flashback leading up to an explosive sword swinging, limbs flying,
decapitation-spurting show down in the House of Blue Leaves.
Tarantino is
as much a hardcore fan as he is a filmmaker — and with Bill he’s building a
monument to the B-grade trash that educated him. He’s created an action-packed world of
junk culture with its own slick look and strange laws. As with Robert Rodrieguez’s Once Upon A Time in
Mexico — which, according to the annals of film lore, was created in part
because of Tarantino’s constant encouragement — he’s doing more than creating a
hyper-slick, super accelerated action world. He’s making himself legendary in our
own.
