If Jackie Brown is Tarantino's most overlooked movie, Kill Bill has to be his most over-celebrated. It feels like Tarantino took the lukewarm response to Jackie Brown as a personal affront to his abilities and decided to crank up everything that the public expected from him to cartoonish levels. He became a caricature of himself, delivering needlessly long and violent explosions of action while piling on as many pop culture references as possible. It's as if The Bride is a symbol for Tarantino himself - as he tried to leave his former life of violence behind, the assassins he built his career with caught up with him and attempted to extinguish any hope for him to embark upon a new path. But The Bride lives on and starts on her own quest for revenge against those who derailed the opportunity to have a life beyond bloodshed. Tarantino is fighting for a career after the excess. To be able to embark on more grounded adventures, he first has to run through a 4 hour karate marathon to earn his creative freedom.
There's no denying the style, passion, and energy that The Bride's quest for revenge incites but there's really only superficial entertainment to be had here. It's exquisite superficial entertainment, don't get me wrong, but the depth of Quentin's earlier pictures is sorely missed. He's assembled a great cast but there's next to no development of any of the characters outside of The Bride and O-Ren. Which makes for a hugely satisfying ending to Volume 1. But the crescendo of the massive Crazy 88 fight with the cliffhanger ending leaves you wanting so much more from Volume 2 and it never really comes. The finale of Volume 2 feels so unrewarding with all the action packed into the first half of the film and so little there afterwards.
But the lack of action is problematic enough, the bigger issue is that we never really get to know who the hell Bill is. David Carradine does fine with what he's given but for the most part, he's a pretty hollow villain. You'd think spending 4 hours leading up to this guy's death we'd get to know a little more about him but ultimately, he's a kung fu Bosley. Even Beatrix Kiddo herself, with all of the screen time she's given, never really gets much character development either. We don't see why she wanted to become an assassin, why she decided to leave - just some training montages and flashbacks of her (attempted) wedding. As much as Tarantino seems to be leaning into the over the top action, it feels like he can't completely abandon his love of dialogue and backstory either so instead you get caught somewhere in between. Not enough action to rely completely on the insanity of the kung fu chaos itself and not enough story or character to justify the amount of backstory that's tacked on.
It's a very mixed experience to say the least and it's only exacerbated by the fact the film is split into halves (the latter of which I happen to think is Tarantino's weakest piece in his filmography). But the structure, split into chapters within volumes, again speaks to the notion that Tarantino may have been better suited for television and presented this as a limited series rather than a film. Which is easy to say in the binge watching era of 2019, but back in 2003 - not even HBO would be willing to take on a project as ambitious (and expensive) as a 4+ hour kung fu series. The meandering story line and episodic encounters feel like a natural fit for a tv series and leads you to wonder now that QT has gone back and edited The Hateful Eight into a miniseries format, what Kill Bill would feel like if it weren't bound to the 120 minute time constraints of a feature film.
But as it is, there's still plenty to love about Kill Bill. The style is so vivid that it's intoxicating. Even with the eye roll inducing musical cues in the opening minutes of the film, you can't help but get caught up in the blood soaked carnage unfolding no matter how heavy handed it's being served up. While Tarantino has become synonymous with violence in films, he's never fully unleashed an action sequence quite like the way he shot the fight scenes in Kill Bill. It's probably as close as we'll ever get to a full on action film from QT, with the battle of the Crazy 88's right on par with anything you'd expect to see in a John Wick film. As a whole I do understand the simple pleasure of seeing a badass kung-fu heroine take down her manipulative former lover and leave with her daughter in tow but I don't understand how this was met with such universal praise when Jackie Brown was met with such a glazed over look of indifference.
And while Kill Bill has some of Tarantino's most skillfully directed sequences and delivers a good amount of fun along the way, it's just clearly a step in the wrong direction looking back at the resume Tarantino was building towards with his first three pictures. This feels like a turning point in his career where he became a director first and a writer second; whereas his output in the 90's was much more buoyed by his jam-packed and colorfully dense scripts. This is where the style starts to outweigh the substance and Quentin starts relishing in his own hype a little too much.
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