Kill Bill, Vol. 1
2003
***
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, David Carradine, Sonny Chiba, Julie Dreyfus, Chiaki Kuriyama, Gordon Liu, Michael Parks
After Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino returns to original material, so to speak, with this stylised homage to his favourite kung fu and samurai flicks. Uma Thurman plays a deathly female assassin who was shot on her wedding day. She wakes up from a 4-year coma and seeks revenge against the colleagues who tried to kill her. Tarantino's most self-indulgent and fanboyish work features impressive action scenes, enjoyably over-the-top bloodshed, and some great tunes. However, this ill-disciplined movie includes too much fat, with several irrelevant scenes that forced the director to tell the story across two volumes. It's all presented in chapters and out of chronological order, obviously. In the end, this is only half a movie, as the entire back story is left to Vol. 2.
