The Wake

For more than six years, director Quentin Tarantino has been quiet. The long break, following his underrated last movie Jackie Brown, ended with a 222-page script for a two-part film that was originally intended to be one movie.

The long-awaited film Kill Bill brings back that in-your-face, mouth-dropping sense of grotesque realism that all Tarantino films embody. Yet, this time, Tarantino bends the rules by using a different form of expression: hyper-martial arts.

The 110-minute film is packed with dark humor, samurai swords, high-flying martial arts combat, gory decapitation, an amazing animé cartoon and a sweet story of revenge. Even during the opening credits of the film, Tarantino humorously quotes from Star Trek, “Revenge is a dish best served cold” – Old Klingon Proverb.

Kill Bill is drastically different from the classics Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, which is exactly what Tarantino wanted. In Kill Bill, Tarantino pays homage to the grindhouse flicks that he grew up adoring - the action of Japanese martial arts and Chinese Kung Fu films that made legends of Bruce Lee and Sonny Chiba (Chiba even cameos a legendary sword-maker from Okinawa).

Brought back to the screen are Tarantino alumni such as Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs) and Uma Thurman, who plays the lead character only known as the Bride. Thurman, who was nominated for an Academy Award in Pulp Fiction, gives a stellar performance – her body language alone is written with pain and suffering that makes her character bleed.

Built on revenge, the story tells the obvious tale of the Bride, a one-time assassin, who follows her own personal vendetta to kill Bill. A wedding procession in El Paso, Texas gives the only evidence as to why the Bride takes on her violent blood feud. Shot in the head during her ceremony while pregnant, the Bride miraculously survives the blast – waking four years later from a coma, but without her child. The Bride’s quest for revenge begins as she plans to dismantle Bill’s gang called the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad.

The film, broken into chapters, begins with an establishing shot in chapter one: a middle-America suburb filled with bright colors of greens, reds and yellows. The Bride stands outside a house that looks just like every neighboring house, except this one has scattered Fisher Price toys in the front yard. Immediately after entering, a choreographed martial arts sequence between the Bride and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) follows with broken tables, knife slashes and bloody flesh wounds. This is only a small taste of what hyper-violence Kill Bill has to offer.

To create the unique choreography for nearly unimaginable action sequences, Tarantino teamed up with The Matrix fight scene expert Yuen Wo-Ping. Yet, Kill Bill avoids the digital manipulation that The Matrix Reloaded exploits in such scenes as the Playstation look-a-like Neo vs. the never-ending flow of Mr. Smiths.

In the 20-minute scene at the House of Blue Leaves, more than a 100 of O-Ren Ishii’s (Lucy Liu) Yakuza soldiers face off against the Bride. This intense battle leads to a massacre – sliced off limbs lay scattered over the floor and cries of pain can be heard moaning in the background.

A film made for people with strong stomachs is over in the slice of a blade. Tarantino strayed away from dialogue and turned to action – a change that will be gloriously completed in Kill Bill Vol. 2.