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This couldn't have sat well with cautious execs at the family-friendly Walt Disney Co., whose envelope-pushing subsidiary, Miramax, is releasing the film. Miramax has been a pain in Disney's corporate butt ever since Disney bought the onetime indie upstart in 1993. For one thing, Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein (who'd backed Tarantino's sensational 1992 debut, "Reservoir Dogs," and his phenomenal 1994 follow-up, "Pulp Fiction," and who once called Miramax "the house that Quentin Tarantino built") isn't the sort of guy to give an inch in any creative dispute. So will this latest outrage lead to an overdue parting of the ways? Will Disney finally cut Miramax loose?
You probably don't care, so back to the fun stuff. This past weekend, in London, Tarantino was quoted as urging the youth of this great nation to make a point of seeing his R-rated splatterfest. "Boys will have a great time," he reportedly said, "girls will have a dose of girl power."
You want to see this, right? Of course you do. "Kill Bill Vol. 1" (the first part of a three-hour-plus movie that's been cut in two; the second half will follow in February) is a wild, hyper-bloody, ultra-violent and extremely smart and funny tribute to, among other things, the golden age of Hong Kong kung-fu movies and the now-classic Italian spaghetti westerns of the 1960s. Like most of those films, this one is a revenge saga: The hero has been wronged, and he sets out to dispatch those who wronged him in a variety of violent and alarming ways. Unlike those earlier films, however, "Kill Bill" 's protagonist and most of its bad guys are all women. Kick-ass women, of course.
The story is simple, if not primordial. Uma Thurman is a retired member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS, what else?), which is presided over by a shadowy eminence called Bill, who is also her former lover. Pregnant with a baby girl on the eve of her wedding, the Bride (as Thurman’s character is called) is shot in the head and left for dead, along with the rest of her wedding party.
But she's only in a coma! Four years later, she comes to in a hospital to find that a slimy orderly has been selling her unresisting body for sexual use by even slimier locals. When the next of these characters comes crawling up on top of her, she deals with him in a really novel (and really bloody) way. Then she terminates the terrified orderly in one of the most enthusiastically brutal head-slamming scenes in the history of ... well, of enthusiastically brutal head-slamming scenes.
The Bride then sets out on a quest for vengeance against her former fellow DiVAS and, ultimately, against Bill himself. Her first stop is in suburban Pasadena, California, where another retired DiVA, played by Vivica A. Fox, has set up a new life with her doctor husband and their little daughter. Thurman greets Fox with a punch in the face, and kung-fu havoc ensues. In the midst of this, Fox's wide-eyed little girl comes home from school. You really have to see this sequence to believe it.
The Bride next flies to Okinawa, Japan, where she visits a retired master sword-maker, played by actual kung-fu-movie icon Sonny Chiba. After some hesitation, he agrees to give her one of his celebrated samurai swords, a legendary weapon that will make her virtually invincible.
She flies on to Tokyo, with the new sword nonchalantly propped by her side. (Presumably, it wouldn't fit in the overhead.) Here she confronts another of the DiVAS, O-Ren Ishii (played by Lucy Liu), who has become the first female leader of the Japanese gangster fraternity called the yakuza. The source of O-Ren's vicious nature is traced back to childhood trauma in a brilliant animated sequence that's as savage as anything else in the movie.
The Bride confronts O-Ren in a vast nightclub called the House of Blue Leaves, where the gangster queen is guarded by a masked mini-army of black-suited killers called the Crazy 88s. They attack the Bride in a long, spectacular scene (choreographed by "Matrix" master Yuen Woo-ping) that required eight weeks to shoot. Swords clatter and clang, assailants fly through the air, fountains of blood spurt from the stumps of severed limbs — and the Bride prevails! But then she must get past O-Ren's personal bodyguard, the scary teenage schoolgirl/assassin Go Go Yubari (played, unforgettably, by Chiaki Kuriyama — best known, to those who know her at all, from the Japanese killer-kids cult flick, "Battle Royale"). The Bride prevails again, although not without considerable blood-drenched difficulty.
The Bride and O-Ren finally have it out in a snow-blanketed Japanese garden, in a sword-wielding scene of remarkable beauty and visual delicacy. The movie ends with the not-yet-seen Bill interrogating one of O-Ren's sliced-and-diced cohorts about the Bride. "Does she know," he asks, "that her daughter is still alive?" Roll credits. To be continued.
Obviously, there are many people who would find all of this deeply offensive and indefensible. I don't know any of them, however, and they shouldn't be going to see a movie like this anyway.
Tarantino is a fearless filmmaker with a unique and multilayered pulp sensibility, and "Kill Bill" is a deliriously tangled web of pop-culture references — not least in its soundtrack, for which he acquired the services of the RZA, the presiding producer of that famously kung-fu-intoxicated MC collective, the Wu-Tang Clan. There's a vintage theme by the veteran spaghetti-western composer Luis Bacalov and an exceedingly little-known version of the 1966 Cher hit "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" by Nancy Sinatra. And while it would be obscure enough to interject the Rock-A-Teens' 1959 junk-rock hit "Woo-Hoo" and the Ikettes' 1962 oddity "I'm Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)," Tarantino mulches things up even further by having these antique tunes performed by a rump-shaking, cocktail-dressed Japanese punk trio called the 5.6.7.8's. How much do we love this guy?
"Kill Bill" is an explosive return to form for Tarantino. (I've heard there are people who liked his last film, the 1997 Elmore Leonard adaptation, "Jackie Brown," but I don't know any of them, either.) You may see this movie and hate it, but you won't soon stop talking about it. And given all the forgettable slop that pours through the multiplexes every year, that may be tribute enough to Tarantino's lacerating wit, his whiplash vision.
— by Kurt Loder
For feature interviews with Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino, check out " 'Kill Bill': Looking For Blood."
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Photo: Miramax
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