Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

Yellow-Haired Warrior: Uma Thurman
stars in "Kill Bill: Vol. 1."

Late in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” a character delivers a somber voiceover about the often messy business of revenge. “Like a forest,” he says, “it's easy to get lost, to forget where you came in.”

Indeed, the film's heroine—known alternately as the Bride and Black Mamba, her codename as a linchpin of the Deadly Vipers Assassins group—seems lost in a veritable forest of trouble at the beginning when she's inexplicably double crossed by Bill (little seen David Carradine), her taciturn mentor and husband-to-be, savagely beaten by fellow members of her own gang, and gunned down in a mass execution on her wedding day. And, oh yeah, she was pregnant.

They leave her for dead, but somehow the Bride lives, waking up from a coma four years later in a murky hospital just in time before a stranger prepares to violate her. Fear and confusion quickly give way to steely resolve and fiery rage, and what she does to the creep is only a small prelude to the wholesale retribution to come. It does get quite messy along the way.

Fortunately, there’s nothing messy about Quentin Tarantino’s superb execution in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” the fourth and by far most richly entertaining and satisfying film by the talented writer-director of “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.”

Known for genre bending and ultra-violent tales, Tarantino has a new set of influences this time. If “Dogs” was a fresh take on the film noir movement of the 40s and “Pulp” was a homage to 50s crime novels, “Kill Bill” is in part a tribute to the Japanese samurai classics of Akira Kurosawa (“Seven Samurai,” “Yojimbo”) and to Bruce Lee’s martial arts movies of the 70s. But it takes its biggest cue from Toshiya Fujita’s 1973 “Lady Snowblood,” in which the revenge-minded main character was a female.

Chiaki Kuriyama

There hasn’t always been much of a place for strong women in Tarantino’s world, but “Kill Bill” changes that. Brilliantly played by the lanky blonde Uma Thurman as a steamy, seething engine of deadly vengeance, the Bride also suggests a female version of Charles Bronson in the gritty, urban “Death Wish” films. Likewise, there are admirable turns by Vivica A. Fox, who draws the first card on the Bride’s fight list; Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii, a quietly vicious, Lady Macbeth-type Japanese-American hit woman with redoubtable swordsman skills; and Chiaki Kuriyama  as O-Ren’s diminutive but fearless bodyguard Go Go Yubari, a beautiful but chillingly dark-eyed, merciless teenage killer outfitted like a schoolgirl whose cruel weapon of choice—a heavy metal ball with retractable razors attached to a chain—nearly finishes off the Bride for good.

Tarantino’s crisp, exciting fight choreography and inventive, highly stylized cinematography blend to make “Kill Bill: Vol. 1” one of the most visually striking and exuberant action films to come around in a while. And though it seems illogical to use the word playful to describe a movie replete with so much graphic violence—flying bullets, sliced limbs, and geysers of blood sometimes spewing from beheaded characters—Tarantino’s use of artfully exaggerated, comic book inspired chaos and delirious camera angles is always more darkly funny than disgusting, without the excess shock gore that has sometimes tainted the filmmaker’s previous work.

More highlights include an eight minute long, astonishingly beautiful animated sequence that supplies the moving backstory explaining O-Ren’s tragic tumble into a life of crime, and a soaring musical score—beginning with Nancy Sinatra’s ghostly elegy “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” and culminating with pan flute master Gheorghe Zamfir’s haunting “The Lonely Shepherd”—that evokes Ennio Morricone and gives “Once Upon a Time in the West” a run for the money.