Hang on, because you're in for a bumpy ride. Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill thrill machine is rocketing out.
Actually, it's Kill Bill: Vol. 1. Writer-director Tarantino, with his first feature film since the underrated Jackie Brown six years ago, shot his revenge fantasy as one gargantuan epic.
Then he split it into two, more manageable, chunks of one-hour, 40-plus minutes each. The story in Vol. 1 ends abruptly, but with a startling revelation. The saga will be finished in Kill Bill: Vol. 2, set for release on Feb. 20.
The first film -- a brilliant tour de force of trash cinema -- is quite possibly the most graphically and absurdly violent movie ever made in the Hollywood mainstream.
We see a wedding massacre in flashback. Multiple limbs get severed throughout the film. The top of a woman's head is sheered off at the hairline. Another woman is gutted by knife. A man tries to rape a woman in a coma. Dozens of thugs writhe in pain after being sushied up with a samurai sword. Rivers of blood flow. Kill Bill is an ocean of agony.
Oddly, and wonderfully, this lurid film is also funny -- so ingeniously cartoon-like that the carnage is a crimson-splattered ballet. It is not repulsive, at least to me (although clearly it could offend many viewers, and children should not be allowed to see it). Instead, the film is hypnotically appealing.
The time frame is fractured, just as it was in Tarantino's feature debut Reservoir Dogs and his Oscar-nominated Pulp Fiction. This is part of the filmmaker's desire to unsettle, keep us enthralled, provoke us in extremes.
But the new story is actually quite simple: Uma Thurman plays an elite killer -- nicknamed Black Mamba and a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS) -- who has been in a coma for four years. When she awakes, she realizes she was betrayed by the DiVAS, who left her for dead in a pool of blood at her own wedding. Both movies chronicle the back story and her elaborate revenge. Vol. 1 also establishes the quirky, gangly yet physically fluid Thurman as a sensual action star on the level of Sigourney Weaver in the Alien flicks.
The cast is a brilliant ensemble. David Carradine plays Bill, whose face is never seen in Vol. 1. He figures more strongly in the sequel and, depending on what happens then, Kill Bill could do for eccentric Carradine what Pulp Fiction did for John Travolta -- revive an otherwise moribund career.
Other members of the DiVAS are, for the most part, sensationally played with attitude and visual styling by Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox and Michael Madsen. There is little snappy dialogue -- deliberately -- so they have to be visual.
Key support roles go to Michael Parks, Julie Dreyfuss, Chiaki Kuriyama and Japanese action legend Sonny Chiba, one of Tarantino's boyhood heroes. He trains Thurman in samurai sword and is a major influence on the filmmaker for this effort.
Kill Bill is the sum of its parts and a bold reworking of iconic myths and movie styles. With guts and gusto, Tarantino has distilled the essence of every martial arts, samurai and spaghetti western movie he has ever seen. This being Tarantino, he does not ape them or merely recycle. He reinvents and even adds a 10-minute Japanese anime scene into the mix.
The overall result is intoxicating -- if you have the guts to watch without losing your lunch.
(This film is rated R)
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