Watching Kill Bill: Vol. 1, I was left with one indelible impression: Uma Thurman has some ugly-ass toes. Those gnarled and knotty nubbins are some the most hideous tootsies I’ve ever had the pleasure to have seen cast up on the big screen. This moment in the film, where Thurman’s character has just emerged from a four-year-long coma and is trying to will her big toe to move, must be, at least on some level, a self-referential joke by Tarantino. As this is the first film he has made since 1997’s Jackie Brown, like Thurman, he must have spent a lot of time and energy getting that big toe of inspiration to quiver; then, realizing the hard part was over, he got down to the business of getting the rest of those little piggies a-squealing.
Yes, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, which fills the screen with more decapitations and amputations than your standard meat packing plant, is senseless, ridiculous and absurd. How anyone can take anything that happens in this film seriously is beyond me. Yet and still, it is also a wondrous ode to the joie de vivre of filmmaking, paying homage to great ‘60s and ‘70s action flicks from around the globe. You’ll find references to everything from England’s James Bond films to Japan’s martial arts epics to America’s blaxploitation movies here. However, Tarantino doesn’t simply abscond with universal pop-culture, he celebrates it by imbuing it with the finest cinematic techniques at his disposal. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 works despite its frequent goofiness because Tarantino knows how to use the camera to make us laugh, recoil, shudder and shout.
Unlike Tarantino’s most famous film, Pulp Fiction, which relies on extensive and continuous verbal banter for its most memorable moments, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, outside of a hilarious scene set in an Okinawa sushi bar (Sonny Chiba is a stand-out) is awfully short on lines of witty dialogue. Here, the cleverness is almost exclusively cinematic, in the delirious direction of the sword fights and the stellar use of music throughout. From the smarter-than-words use of the innocence-lost kitsch of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang” over the opening credits, to the cha-chugging rhythms of Al Hirt’s “Green Hornet” and Quincy Jones’ “Ironside” over some of the most insane martial arts samurai sequences in filmdom, Tarantino never takes his foot off the accelerator or his finger off the pounding pulse of this film.
As the survivor of some of the most bad-ass sadism and perversion you’ll ever see in a Hollywood film, Thurman’s character certainly wins our support in her revenge-quest. And while she is only a moderately plausible action hero, Thurman fills the screen with her empathetic and intelligent characterisation. But still, we’ve got those toes. If you’ve gotta have a flaw, the toes are as good a place as any, given how easy it would be to hide them. Yet, there they are, considerably larger-than-life, hanging out there for all of us to ogle. Indeed, Thurman is not unlike the film itself – beautiful, glorious, and exhilarating, but marred by the hideous footnote that is the fact that this is but a truncated version of Tarantino’s tale. The film cannot stand on its own, at least not effectively; indeed, when the screen fades to black, audiences will be wondering if there is any there there. We’re left with a rather large sense of unfinished business, both narratively and thematically. While Kill Bill: Vol. 1 hints at some deeper purpose and Thurman imbues her character with considerable emotional range, taken on its own, the first instalment of Kill Bill is about as satisfying as the films it references. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is certainly bloody and bold, but alas, it has no resolution.
