During the 1970s there was a queasy urban myth that, in New York cinemas, drug dealers were skulking down the aisles at midnight shows jabbing innocent moviegoers with needles, so instantly enslaving them to heroin.
After one single viewing of Kill Bill Volume I — Quentin Tarantino’s first movie for six years — I felt like the director himself had cacklingly jammed his hypodermic into my throbbing arm. Really, no one delivers that sheer, aneurism-inducing rush with the same intravenous efficiency as Tarantino. It may not be the best film of the year, nor the best Tarantino film. But it’s sure as hell got to be the best way, the only way, to mainline pure adrenalin in the cinema. Whether this results in euphoria or nausea depends on the needle-user.
Brutally bloody and thrillingly callous from first to last, Kill Bill covers its action in a kind of delirium-glaze. Its storyline rolls out in a simulacrum universe, a place which looks and sounds like planet Earth in the early 21st century, but isn’t. It’s a martial- arts movie universe where the normal laws of economics, police work, physiology and gravity do not apply: a world composed of a brilliantly allusive tissue of spaghetti western and Asian martial-arts genres, on which the director’s own, instantly identifiable presence is mounted as a superstructure.
But this isn’t the floatingly beautiful martial-arts tradition as resurrected by Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Zhang Yimou’s Hero. It’s a world of manga and comic-book serials, of flash and trash and assassins who scream defiance long after their limbs have been chopped and stumps are geysering blood in a way I haven’t seen since Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
It’s a story of revenge, the traditional, perfunctory pretext for martial arts — a unidimensional narrative motivation. Uma Thurman has never looked better than here, as The Bride, who takes a bullet in the head on her wedding day, an attempted whack by her former associates — Darryl Hannah, Lucy Liu and Vivaca A Fox: not so much Charlie’s Angels as Bill’s Devils.
The Bride awakens from her coma with none of the speech and motor-skill problems associated with serious head injury. She makes her legs work through sheer will power. She sets off on her blood-splattered odyssey in this through-the-looking-glass world where people fight without encountering guns or cops. She even takes her sword into the plane as carry-on. Airport security presumably confiscated her tweezers and manicure scissors.
Without Roger Avary as co-writer, Tarantino arguably loses some dialogue riffs and narrative complexity. But even when the film looks directionless, the director suffuses everything — costumes, performances, blade-flash editing and hallucinatory sound design — with something compelling.
The extravagant power of Tarantino’s infantilist genius makes objections and qualifications look obtuse. Kill Bill just leaves you feeling excited: pointlessly, wildly excited. — Â