|
KILL BILL : VOL. 1
7/10
USA 2003
: Quentin TARANTINO : 110 mins
After 1997’s
box-office dud Jackie Brown (still his best), Tarantino retreats
to teenage movie-fan’s bedroom-universe to lick his wounds and emerges
with this wildly overhyped two-parter: not since Kubrick’s heyday has
a nervy Hollywood studio indulged a ‘genius’ director to such lengths.
The plot is ostentatiously slight: after four comatose years, an unnamed
assassin (Uma Thurman) tracks down ex-colleagues (Lucy Liu, etc) who bloodily
gatecrashed her wedding on the orders of enigmatic boss Bill (David Carradine,
unseen).
 Resulting
vengeance-quest ends up extremely gore-splatted, though it’s tame stuff
compared with kind of the stuff Takashi
Miike has been coming up with recently. Deliberately daft, very larkish,
overlong picture hits some dead spots along the way, but has easily enough
touches of wit and brilliance to stay more than watchable - even if Thurman
can’t really act, and Tarantino can’t resist the odd detours into dead-ends
of for-its-own-sake ‘cool.’ Entertaining stuff, but this director is far
too talented to fritter his skill on what are essentially bloated B-movie
shenanigans.
15th
October, 2003
(seen same day, Odeon Newcastle)
click here
for more notes on second viewing
first seen
2nd October, 2003 : UGC Sheffield
for original
review, click here for short version and
here for long (long version coming soon)
by Neil
Young
-
|
