FilmBlather.com

"It's mercy, compassion and forgiveness I lack, not rationality."

There is often a thin line between homage and mockery, and Quentin Tarantino crosses it. Six years and 55 million dollars in the making, Kill Bill Vol. 1, with Vol. 2 to follow in February, is supposed to be a tribute to the Hong Kong revenge movies that the director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction adores. But while Tarantino may indeed love these flicks, he obviously does not respect them. I believe that a director should respect his material.

And you see, I think this would have made a tremendous movie had the man taken the plot even semi-seriously. I don't remember ever having encountered a case like this, where I believed in the material but the director transparently did not. All of the elements are here for a grandiose if goofy epic, and Tarantino occasionally imbues the proceedings with the necessary degree of dread importance, but he invariably proceeds to undercut it with a barrage of snide, sarcastic gimmickry.

You can almost see the promise of the story trying to leap off the screen. An assassin (Uma Thurman), identified only as The Bride, is attacked on her wedding day by her own Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, led by the nefarious Bill. They massacre nine of her loved ones, including the baby in her womb, but only manage to leave her in a coma with a gunshot wound to the head. Big mistake.

Five years later, the Bride wakes up, remembers what happened, and makes herself a kill list. She then proceeds to mercilessly execute everyone on it, leaving Bill for last. On an island off the coast of Japan, she contacts a legendary sword-maker (Sonny Chiba) and has him craft her a weapon the likes of which the world hasn't seen since his retirement. Then she goes after her first victim -- a vicious samurai assassin named O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu).

Tarantino approaches this like a kid in the candy store, unleashing a tsunami of tricks, gimmicks and flamboyancies. He divides the movie into "chapters," complete with intertitle headings. He breaks up the chronology in a way that seems impossible to justify until you consider the heavy re-editing that likely transpired when the decision to split Kill Bill into two installments. It was a bad decision only because it's not a very good movie. I have nothing against reviving the Serial. Bring back the epic stories, I say. Look at how Lord of the Rings turned out.

The appropriate reaction to Kill Bill, however, is "GAH!" My brain actually wanted to be emotionally involved with the story and the characters, but was consistently overruled by the fact that Tarantino isn't taking any of this seriously. Not only are a record number of limbs severed, but each slice is punctuated by a ridiculous geyser-like spurting of blood -- funny the first time, distracting and stupid thereafter. A lengthy section of the film is told in anime, for no other reason than because Tarantino feels like it. The Miramax logo is immediately followed by an "old-fashioned" "Feature Presentation" title card. Even when there's nothing you can specifically pinpoint, there is an everpresent feeling that the director is standing off-camera and sneering.

I unconditionally loved two scenes in the film -- the opening confrontation between Thurman and Vivica A. Fox, and the "boardroom meeting sequence" that introduces Lucy Liu. These have the right idea, mixing the conceptually amusing and the deadly serious in such a way as to create a feeling of otherworldly significance. I liked parts of the lengthy climactic battle as well, but Tarantino's geeky deprecation of the genre defeats him there.

I am recommending the film anyway: it's unique enough to always be interesting, if not very much else. And I admit to anticipating Vol. 2, if only to see what else the director can find to throw at us. But by god, this could have been great. Spectacular. A masterpiece. If only Quentin had decided to make an epic rather than an epic joke.