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Kill Bill Volume 1
(Reviewed September 24, 2003)
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People who claim to like this stupid, tiresome, thoroughly lousy movie will fall into two categories:
(a) The desperately pathetic, intellectually insecure Richard Roeper / Peter Travers variety of aggressively clueless critics (and wannabes), who think it is hip and cool and post-modern to deify
crap-that-knows-it-is-crap. (A quick rule of thumb: Anyone who says he enjoyed "Punch-Drunk Love" fits quite neatly into this category.) You know the type. The screening room where I got a sneak peek
at "Kill Bill" was full of jerkoffs like this, the kind who laugh out loud at embarrassingly dumb lines of dialog simply because they want to be heard laughing at them by others in "look-at-me-getting-it"
appreciation. They know the dialog is utterly witless, but they intuit that writer Quentin Tarantino must have known that, too -- which means he intended the lines to be lousy, which makes them funny.
(Perfect example: After star Uma Thurman has dispatched some of Lucy Liu's henchmen, Liu says, "Silly rabbit." Thurman responds, "Trix are for kids." It's just plain dumb, and everyone gets the
reference, and it is not especially funny -- but the "watch-me-laughers" had to roar with approval for everyone to hear.) Critics like those already have so much invested in proclaiming Tarantino a cinematic
god that they will perpetuate said charade in perpetuity, never to be dissuaded from leaving the Emperor's-New-Clothes bandwagon whose wheels they keep greased.
(b) The second sub-strata of saps who will say they like "Kill Bill" are the creepy, girlfriendless, borderline sociopaths who get off on interminable scenes of punching, kicking, stabbing,
shooting, and general dismemberment -- all the better when a hot blond chick is getting shot, cut up and beat bloody. They will say that they appreciate Tarantino's "homages" in "Kill Bill" to everything
from Japanese anime to 1970s exploitation flicks to chop-sockey and samurai movies. They will argue that it's all "cartoon violence," that Thurman always eventually triumphs, and that the fact the movie is
so over-the-top is what makes the mindless mass mayhem so amusing. But the truth is probably that they can't get dates, never get laid, resent the hell out of women, and channel all of their frustrated,
unsatisfied lusts into violence fantasies involving females.
Look, folks, this observation isn't coming from some tightassed religious moron movie critic like Michael Medved. I've written porn for NUGGET'S KINKY KONNECTIONS, for Christ's
sake, so it ain't like I'm marching with Andrea Dworkin on weekends. But when you sit in a dark theater, see a woman getting the shit kicked out of her onscreen over and over again, and hear the chillingly
mirthless laughter of pudgy celibates whose only meaningful relationship with women probably involves characters in videogames, comic books and porn...
...or when you hear those same still-living-with-their-mothers prom rejects giggling like drooling maniacs when a sicko hospital orderly sells another man the right to rape a comatose Thurman in
her hospital bed...
...or when you see a group of those twitchy, sniggering, crazy-eyed Ritalin candidates loudly conferring about what a genius Tarantino is afterward...
...well, let's just say it makes you glad they probably won't get the chance to reproduce.
As for the movie itself: The most unexpected thing about "Kill Bill" is how boring it is. Once you get the setup -- a bride left for dead hunts down and kills every individual member of a murder
squad to which she formerly belonged -- you realize you're in for nothing more interesting than a series of violent vignettes impersonating a plot. If that's your idea of a pleasant evening's entertainment, how
about doing society a favor and checking yourself into the psych ward. The movie will appear in two installments because Quentin apparently was too in love with his crappy handiwork to cut it, but it could
have benefitted enormously from some chopping. (The scenes involving Uma and a swordmaker feel endless, for example.)
It's also one of those flicks that doesn't even take itself seriously (it's crap-that-knows-it-is-crap, remember?). What kind of talent does it take to harken back to bad movies of yesteryear in order to
make an updated but equally bad movie? Hell, forget the "yesteryear" part -- one scene in "Kill Bill" bears a startling resemblance to the most famous scene in "The Matrix Reloaded," which was released a
mere four months ago. Instead of a huge number of Agent Smiths in black suits, white shirts, black ties and black sunglasses attacking Neo, "Kill Bill" gives us a huge number of Japanese in black suits,
white shirts, black ties and black masks attacking Thurman. Oh, but they have swords this time, which makes it a completely different thing...right?
The chronic masturbators who probably constitute Tarantino's primary fan base should be aware that "Kill Bill" includes a menacingly cute Japanese schoolgirl badass named Go-Go (in school
uniform, no less) who will make more than their hairy palms damp, but the movie contains zero nudity. Sorry, boys.
Back Row Grade: F
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