Kill Bill Volume One

By Simon Woodhouse

How do you create a cinematic icon? I think the answer to this question is you don't, they create themselves. But there are two ingredients that seem to help the process along - time and audience appreciation. Most decent movies create a bit of buzz when they're first released, however ninety nine percent of them quickly disappear off the radar. Of the ones that stick around, it's usually the film itself that remains in the public consciousness, rather than individual characters. In the case of Kill Bill Volume One, the movie still has a keen following, but it's Uma Thurman's character (simply known as 'The Bride' in the first episode) who's well on the way to achieving iconic status.

Thurman has always had an air of natural cool about her, even when her movie career has taken a wrong turn. She seems to be the sort of actress who always comes out smelling of roses, even if the films she's in stink. However, her place in cinema history is now assured thanks to her performance in Kill Bill.

This film lays its cards on the table right from the word go. The very first scene has The Bride lying in a pool of blood, looking as though she's been beaten to within an inch of her life. Kill Bill is a violent film, no doubt about it. It's also a movie that tells its story in a series of overlapping flashbacks. So after seeing The Bride looking as though she's at death's door, she next appears in the prime of life, and well enough to engage in a rather brutal knife fight. This confrontation, however, is broken up by a few moments of humor. The Bride's adversary is a stay-at-home mom, and they're interrupted when one of the youngsters arrives home from school. Both women warn the little girl against treading on any of the broken glass their altercation has left scattered about the lounge. The toddler then heads off to her room, and the two fighters carry one where they left off. Moments like this pop up throughout the movie, but if overly violent films aren't your thing, they'll do little to encourage you to keep watching.

As the film rolls on, we learn that The Bride was once part of a group of assassins known as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. But their leader, Bill (he's half of the film's title) fired her, and when you get fired from an assassination squad it's not pleasant. The scene right at the beginning of the movie was The Bride's last day at work as an assassin. What follows on from that is her efforts to get even with the rest of the squad, and by 'get even', I mean kill them.

Having jumped back and forth a bit more, the movie arrives at a point in time where The Bride is lying in hospital in a coma, one year after being 'fired' by Bill. She wakes up, deals with a rather unpleasant orderly who's been taking advantage of her while she was out of it, and sets off on her revenge quest. Now the knife fight with the stay-at-home mom was her first act of revenge, so now we jump forward again to victim number two. All this might sound a bit confusing, but each new passage in time starts with an onscreen snippet of text that helps to explain what's happening.

Victim number two on The Bride's 'must kill' list is O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), the head of a Japanese crime gang known as the Crazy Eighty Eight. This character is introduced via a segment of blood-thirsty, Manga style animation. In order to get O-Ren, The Bride feels as though she must have a samurai sword, but not just any samurai sword, one made by master sword smith Hattori Hanzo (Sonny Chiba). She hops on a plane to Japan, gets the sword and faces off against O-Ren and her mob. This section of the film dominates almost three quarters of the running time, and culminates in a spectacular sword fight between The Bride and all of the Crazy Eighty Eight. She then hacks her way past O-Ren's personal bodyguard Go Go Yubari (a rather sinister looking Japanese teenage girl), and faces off against the main woman herself.

These fight scenes last for about half an hour, but you can just tell they took weeks to film. And even though the physics are all wrong (people run up walls and jump further than they should, that sort of thing), they're still very watch-able. Sure they're violent, but it's almost a cartoon type of violence, in so much as it's so over the top you can't really take it seriously.

Uma Thurman makes this movie, and I can't imagine any other actress playing the lead role as well as she does. Lucy Liu is good as well, but beside Thurma, it's Sonny Chiba as the Japanese sword smith who's the other standout character. Originally intended as a three-hour marathon of high energy violence, volume one doesn't need to be watched before volume two in order to be enjoyed. However, if you like this film you'd be daft not to watch the other half of the saga. If you don't like it, then you won't like volume two either. Because Kill Bill is what it is, it's one of those films people either love or hate. And that's what adds to its greatness - it's a no-holds-barred, unapologetic, in-your-face action movie, which also has excellent dialogue, top-notch acting, and Uma Thurman too.