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This review is going to be a little different than the other reviews I’ve done. The reason for that is because a while back, my computer decided to take a dirtnap and I lost the reviews; and being too lazy to actually retype two reviews, I’ve decided that it would be easier for me to just type up one review for the two movies. Before you get your panties in a bunch, just know that, to my knowledge, this movie was originally intended to be one film, but because the Weinsteins’ thought the movies length was a little too long, or because they wanted to capitalize on Tarantino’s popularity and have dumb people pay twice to see one movie, they decided to split the film into two films. For those of you who haven’t figure out what movie I’m talking about, it’s Kill Bill.

Kill Bill tells the tale of a pregnant woman dubbed “The Bride” (Uma Thurman), a former assassin who is seemingly killed on her wedding day by her ex-lover, Bill (David Carradine), and the other assassins, known as the Deadly Vipers (Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah and Michael Madsen), who work for him. However, instead of dying, “The Bride” slips into a coma for four years. Upon waking up from her coma, “The Bride” notices that she isn’t pregnant anymore and decides that Bill has taken everything from her and that there is only one thing left to do; Kill Bill. From there on out, “The Bride” picks off Bill’s Deadly Vipers one by one, until eventually, the final showdown between herself and Bill.

The marketing for this movie kept me from seeing this film in the theaters; that and the fact that I didn’t feel like spending over 20 bucks to see one movie. The hype also kept me away from the movie for a long time, but after a few years, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Mistakenly, the first time I saw the movie was on TNT; which, as you know, means it was edited. The edited version kind of kills any seriousness that the movie has and makes it laughable… especially the, “My name is Buck and I’m here to Par-tay” line in the edited version. So, I actually had to check out the DVDs just to do this review.

The film is one of your typical Tarantino movies. There are some solid performances from the actors, the random scenes that don’t seem to serve any purpose in the film what-so-ever, Tarantino’s love of tossing pop culture references that only a few people will catch, the rather over the top violence and even a long speech given by one of the characters. The speech, given by Carradine towards the end of the film, literally saved this movie from being an overrated piece of mediocrity and raised it to the level of pretty good.

Kill Bill is by no means a perfect film; it does have a few flaws. The first problem is with the length of the movie. The film does run a bit too long and it makes you wonder why Tarantino didn’t decide to trim it a little bit in post-production. There are some scenes in the movie that appear to be in the movie just to pad the running time. If these scenes were cut out of the film, maybe the Weinsteins would have released the film it as one movie instead of two. Another problem is that Tarantino wastes Michael Madsen; a man who shined in Reservoir Dogs. Here, Madsen doesn’t really do much of anything. The last problem is that the film feels like two completely different films. The first one has a cartoony vibe to it while the second almost has a serious vibe to it. It almost seems like Tarantino didn’t know how he wanted the story to go.

Truth be told, Kill Bill is a pretty good movie, but it isn’t this fantastic movie that some people keep telling me. The movie is a long, drawn out piece that pays homage to many different types of movies (Hong Kong martial arts movies, exploitation films and spaghetti westerns) that Tarantino loved to watch while growing up.

Final Synopsis: If you like revenge flicks or Tarantino movies, check this out and decide for yourself.

Points Lost: -1 for the movie have two different vibes to it, -1 for wasting Madsen, -1 for the film’s length.

Lesson Learned: When edited, the word “pussy” becomes “par-tay”.

Burning Question: How do you think the third volume will play out?

Kill Bill
7/10

Tags: 2003, 2004, action, bo svenson, chiaki kuriyama, Christopher Allen Nelson, Daryl Hannah, David Carradine, drama, Gordon Liu, Julie Dreyfus, Jun Kunimura, larry bishop, latest movie review, Lucy Liu, michael bowen, michael madsen, michael parks, Perla Haney-Jardine, quentin tarantino, recent3, revenge, Sonny Chiba, Uma Thurman, vivica a. fox