Kill Bill: Volume 1 Review

This is Tarantino operating as a curator of other people's cinema, and the surprising thing is how little that hurts. The Bride's rampage is assembled from Japanese swordplay, Shaw Brothers zooms, Italian western scoring and a long anime interlude that swerves the film sideways for ten minutes and somehow works. The House of Blue Leaves is the set piece everything else exists to reach, a twenty minute fight that changes film stock, drops to black and white to sneak past censors, empties the room and then goes quiet for the snowbound duel with Lucy Liu.

Uma Thurman carries it almost wordlessly, which matters because the script gives her far less to say than any Tarantino lead before her. That restraint costs something. Volume 1 is structurally half a story, it stops rather than ends, and the characters are postures rather than people, which is fine while the swords are out and thin whenever they are not. The trailer scene with Vivica A. Fox is the only stretch here with real human weight, and the film does not go looking for another.