Is saying that an action movie is improbable a redundant statement? Instead, should probable action films be championed because they have some sense of reality ingrained in all of the events going on? Regardless, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is an action film of the improbable variety, but deserves championing nonetheless because it entertains. At the end of the day, improbable or not, that’s the primary goal of an action film.
At its most basic form, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 has little story and only the simplest of motivations. Our lead isn’t even a character that we get the name of. Other characters know her name, and even get opportunities to say it, but we do not get to hear it thanks to it being bleeped out. It isn’t profane, as far as we can tell, (and it’s not like writer/director Quentin Tarantino to care about censors anyway), but it’s bleeped out regardless. We only get to refer to her as “The Bride” (Uma Thurman).
As the title “Kill Bill” indicates, The Bride’s objective is to kill a man named Bill. We don’t get to see Bill, but in the film’s opening shots, we see his hand and the gun within it. He shoots The (then-pregnant) Bride and leaves her for dead at her wedding. She doesn’t die from this though, instead being left in a coma for four years. Now she wants to kill him for what he did to her and her child, while also killing all of the people working for him, as they all had a part to play in the massacre on her wedding day.
The story is told in a few segments. The first, which serves as an introduction, has The Bride go off to kill the second member of her hit list, Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox). This gives us an entertaining action scene, and also takes place before we’re even aware of what is going on. The Bride literally shows up at Green’s doorstep and the two begin fighting. It’s a great introduction to a film where the action scenes are the primary concern.
The second story doesn’t feature any action at all, save for a sliced-in-two baseball. The Bride travels to Okinawa, Japan, in order to get a samurai sword. The final part is The Bride’s search for the another target on her list, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). This story ends up being where we spend the most time, mostly spent with characters swinging large swords at one another for approximately half of an hour.
It’s during this final story that we realize how improbable something like this is. Not the story, which, if you give it the benefit of the doubt 10 or 30 times could happen. No, I’m talking about the stunts, choreography and general feel of the action sequences. Okay, so we’ve got this really strong, well-trained character. I can buy that. But making her way through 88+ presumably strong, well-trained bodyguards? I don’t think that’s possible. And then if a character’s arm is cut off, blood squirts out like a fountain, spraying other characters that are 10 feet away. Finally, there is one scene in particular that has The Bride and one body guard dual while balancing on a railing, despite the floor being no more than two feet below. Why? Well, because spectacle is far more important than probability, I suppose.
That’s ultimately what Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is: An exercise in creating a large, over-the-top spectacle that isn’t grounded in reality one bit. For the most part, this works and remains entertaining. There are a couple of times during this 30-minute fight scene that Tarantino chooses to do something that made me dislike select parts of the film. What he did was completely switch up the look and feel of what we were watching. For a few minutes, the screen turns grayscale and we watch people fighting in black and white. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but when no other part of the film is done that way, and there doesn’t appear to be any reason to do this, it’s annoying. A similar thing happens for a minute or two when a character in the movie turns off the lights so that characters have to fight against a bright blue backdrop. Again, there was no reason for this to happen, further making me question if there was too much emphasis placed on creating a spectacle.
But that’s the worst thing I have to say about Kill Bill: Vol. 1. That’s correct, the way 6 minutes of the film were shot is all that I have to complain about. And even then, that time doesn’t significantly hinder the final product — it was just somewhat annoying. The rest of the film was top-notch. The acting was good, the ending was terrific and left me wanting more, and the action scenes were incredibly entertaining. You’d think that 30 minutes of people duking it out with swords would get boring after a while, but that’s not what happens.
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is a really entertaining film. Despite having relatively little plot and only basic motivating factors, it works. It also makes you want more, leaving on a cliffhanger that made me want to see Vol. 2 right away. The action scenes are really fun, and if Tarantino had just left their style alone, I wouldn’t have much of anything to complain about. I was thoroughly entertained, and if Vol. 2 ends up being as good as Vol. 1 is, I’ll be a very happy person.