archive.Joe Lamantia.com

It is dif­fi­cult to antic­i­pate what one is sup­posed to take away from just the first half of an eclec­tic and heav­ily styl­ized movie released far away from its con­clu­sion. Nev­er­the­less it’s safe to set this qual­i­fier aside when review­ing it, since some com­bi­na­tion of direc­tor, pro­ducer, stu­dio, actors, and dis­trib­u­tors obvi­ously believed the first half of Kill Bill Vol­ume I was solid enough to stand on it’s own as an offer­ing, and released it with all the cus­tom­ary fan­fare.  I was dis­ap­pointed (even after estab­lish­ing low expec­ta­tions in the first place). The action and fight­ing set pieces were fine (Yuen Wo Ping did a much bet­ter job cre­at­ing inter­est­ing chore­og­ra­phy for Kill Bill Vol. I than for The Matrix: Reloaded), but the story used as Kill Bill’s skele­ton is so flimsy it is almost in the way — espe­cially when pre­sented in the dis­jointed plot / nar­ra­tive we’re accus­tomed to from Taran­tino — and aside from a few scat­tered moments of inspired cin­e­matog­ra­phy ( the water bucket and foun­tain in the zen gar­den), I found the film flat.

As an homage to samu­rai movies, it was largely faith­ful: Taran­tino man­aged to con­vinc­ingly recre­ate the feel of a Sat­ur­day after­noon B-movie on cable tele­vi­sion. But from a Hol­ly­wood direc­tor in 2003, that’s a loos­ing gam­bit. What made the orig­i­nal Samu­rai movies Taran­tino apes in Kill Bill a sat­is­fy­ing experience was their essen­tial for­eignness, and the very dif­fer­ent view­ing con­texts and asso­ci­ated expec­ta­tions that enveloped them. Lack­ing both of these key sup­port­ing ele­ments, I’m left won­der­ing about the point of the exer­cise for the moment.