I’m sure you should’ve seen at least one from the Kill Bill series. Let’s now look at its story outline. In a preface, Bill shoots the injured and pregnant Bride. Only his hands are seen. The Bride is next encountered visiting Vernita in American suburbia. The two women fight with anything which comes to hand, the Bride eventually killing her adversary with a knife. She crosses Vernita’s name off the list of Deadly Viper Assassination Squad members who are to be killed in reprisal for what happened to her. In another flashback, the injured Bride is seen lying in an El Paso chapel, being examined by a policeman who treats her as though she is already dead.

A stylish woman walks into a hospital. This is Elle Driver. She changes into a nurse’s uniform and finds the Bride unconscious and alone. As Elle is about to administer a lethal injection, Bill telephones to order that the mission be aborted. Honor demands that the Bride should not be killed in her sleep.

Four years later, the Bride awakens after a mosquito bite. She goes in search of O-Ren Ishii, the next name on the list. An animé sequence reveals O-Ren’s life story. As a child, she witnessed the murder of her parents. Her revenge was to kill the pedophile boss of the gang who murdered them. By the age of twenty, she was a top assassin.

O-Ren has taken control of Japanese criminal gangs, decapitating the only gangland boss who opposes her. The Bride commissions a sword from a retired craftsman in Okinawa and stages a showdown at a busy club. She disposes of O-Ren’s bodyguards. O-Ren escapes, but the Bride intercepts her in the garden and kills her. The Bride leaves Japan in her quest for Bill, unaware that her daughter is alive.

Kill Bill – A Cultural Context

Quentin Tarantino came to public attention in the early 1990s with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Jackie Brown had less commercial success. A six-year gap followed before Kill Bill was ready. Uniquely for a high-profile film, its length meant that it was released in two parts. Pulp crime fiction stories from Black Mark magazine provided the inspiration, and there were liberal borrowings from other films.

The grudging admiration of Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian was representative of one school of critical reaction: ‘The extravagant power of his infantilist genes makes objections and qualifications look obtuse. What comes to mind, frankly, is Godard’s playful tribute to Nicholas Ray as the essence of cinema. Kill Bill just leaves you feeling excited: pointlessly, wildly excited. How many films can do that?’ Something of this excitement communicated itself to Roger Ebert, who likened Tarantino to ‘a virtuoso violinist races through "The Flight of the Bumblebee" ’, even if the film was ‘all storytelling and no story’. The opposition was forthright. Documentary film-maker Nick Broomfield declared: ‘If I’d made that, I’d change my name,’ while for David Denby in the New Yorker: ‘Kill Bill is what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap.’

By:Bob Willson