Preface

• Recently, I re-watched Kill Bill (both Volume 1 and 2) and I was thinking about it so much over the past few days that I wanted to do a fun review on it.
• If you’ve never seen Kill Bill, then don’t worry because this is a completely Spoiler-Free review.
• So let’s discuss!

Review

• So Kill Bill is the 4^th film by Quentin Tarantino, and is one of his best in my opinion. (Though there’s still a special place in my Blu-Ray collection for Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.)
• And in Kill Bill, Uma Thurman plays ‘The Bride.’
• The Bride has just woken up from a 4-year long coma after being shot in the head right before her own wedding. Unfortunately, she was pregnant at the time and her unborn child didn’t make it through the coma.
• So now she’s out on a revenge mission to kill the assassins that tried to take her down in the first place.
• The whole ‘assassins revenge’ thing may sound a little cliché, but trust me when I say that this movie is original and unique on every level.
• First, with the cast.
• Uma Thurman is possibly the best she’s ever been in Kill Bill, and you see the damage in her eyes during the course of this whole four hour event.
• The Bride feels like this relatable person, which makes her the most relatable martial artist action heroine that I’ve ever seen in a movie.
• Because Uma Thurman pulls off that relatable factor, but she’s also SO AWESOME in the action sequences of this movie.
• Speaking of the action sequences, we then move on to Lucy Liu’s character in the movie.
• Most of Kill Bill Vol. 1 is focused on The Bride’s backstory, and the main villain of Volume 1 is Lucy Liu’s character O-Ren Ishii.
• What I loved about O-Ren Ishii in this movie is illustrated perfectly in one board-room scene (you know the one): she’s calm, collected, and methodical, but also completely out-of-her-mind and aggressively violent all in one.
• And I loved that we got to see her character’s backstory.
• They tell Lucy Liu’s character’s backstory through a series of anime too, which I thought was absurdly cool and original. Instead of just doing a flashback, Tarantino changed the style of the movie for 10-15 minutes to honor the importance of just the one character.
• And when The Bride does eventually face off against O-Ren Ishii, it’s INSANE.
• It is the definition of insane.
• Oh yeah, this movie is pretty bloody too…
• Vivica A. Fox is also in the movie, and one of my three favorite sequences in the whole event is with her character at the very beginning of the movie.
• It shows quickly who her character is, it establishes who The Bride is, and it throws you an amazing action sequence to hook you into the movie.
• Another awesome character in the movie is Elle. She doesn’t have a ton to do over the course of the movie, but she was the most effective use of a smaller character that they could have done. Another memorable scene in the movie was with her character in the trailer… That one is probably my favorite.
• And Michael Madsen is in the movie too. His character is the only one in the movie that I might say is a little underdone, just not developed the whole way through. They spend a lot of time with him at the beginning of Vol. 2, but it feels like the low point of the movie, like there isn’t as much to enjoy as other parts.
• Then we get to the actual character of Bill. Bill was a really cool character in the movie because, like Lucy Liu, he was equal parts collected and crazy. He had a personal connection to The Bride too (which I won’t spoil), that made him even more interesting. He had a lot of really cool flashbacks throughout the movie too, that really just engaged you with his character and set up the final confrontation between him and The Bride.
• Speaking of final confrontations and action in general, this movie is insane with the action.
• There’s blood everywhere in this movie, but it isn’t a movie like Evil Dead where there’s only blood there because the director wants a lot of gore.
• The violence in this movie is used really effectively and enhances the movie, it glues your eyes to the screen.
• Is a little bit of it unrealistic? Of course.
• I’m pretty sure that decapitating a guy wouldn’t create a blood shower from his neck stump. But nevertheless, the violence was one of this movie’s strongest aspects. You see The Bride going on her rampage and killing these guys in gruesome ways, and you don’t want anything like that to happen to her, raising the stakes.
• But that does remind me of one of my few problems with the movie: it can be a bit too unrealistic at points.
• Without spoiling anything, there are a few times where characters live through certain wounds or injuries that they definitely would not have lived through otherwise.
• But overall, Quentin Tarantino did a masterful job directing this movie. He brilliantly incorporated martial arts into it, anime, tons of gore, western homages, and even mob movie homages to an extent.
• I’ll say this: I LOVE Volume 1.
• Volume 1 has the revenge-ness, the anime, the brilliant storytelling and still the violence. Volume 1 on its own is probably my second favorite Tarantino film and I’d give it Five Stars.
• But… Volume 2 is also a factor, since they were technically one movie. Volume 2 was also really cool, but it was a lot more of straight-up martial arts and training as opposed to the uniqueness that Volume 1 had. And it did drag on a bit, where Volume 1 felt perfectly paced. I’d give Volume 2 the ‘Definitely Worth Checking Out’ rating.
• But as an overall, combined 4-hour event. The two ratings compromise and I’d say that Kill Bill is Awesome and Worth Checking Out Multiple Times! And I have checked it out, multiple times.

***

So guys, those are my thoughts on Kill Bill! I’ll try to knock out reviews on Tarantino’s other films before The Hateful Eight comes out (check out my first impressions of Reservoir Dogs here). But what are your guys thoughts on this movie, and what was your favorite scene (if you’ve seen it already)? Let me know in the comments down below, and as always, thanks for reading guys.