Review of Kill Bill Vol. 1, directed by Quentin Tarantino

As someone who has spent a ton of my time and life researching and watching Korean cinema, it was hard not to come across references to Kill Bill in the English language scholarship and media. Tarantino was a guy heavily influenced by Asian cinema, and the 2000s was a time in Korean cinema especially where things got violent.

Think of Park Chan-wook and Oldboy, the Vengeance Trilogy putting him on the map around the world. Then there were movies like I Saw the Devil in the later half of the decade, or other movies simply depicting graphic violence even if it wasn’t the actual focus of the film.

All of this to say is that although I watched all of these Korean movies, and even some Japanese ones, I never actually got around to watching Kill Bill. It was something that eluded me for the longest time, until one day I was scrolling through Netflix and saw it was now available on there.

So I watched it! Here is my review.

The Bride decides to take revenge against those who ruined her life, pregnancy, and wedding.

Our main character in both volumes of Kill Bill is the Bride, whom in 1999, decides to try and get married. She was a former member of the Deadly Vipers, who were a group of assassins. However, as we may learn pretty quickly, you can try to run away from a life of crime, but sometimes it always comes back in the nastiest ways possible.

As she practices for her wedding in Texas, the Deadly Vipers and their leader, Bill, launch an operation where they kill everyone in the chapel during the rehearsal. The Bride is knocked to the ground and heavily wounded, but as Bill stands over her, she tells him the child she’s pregnant with is his.

That doesn’t stop him though, and he shoots her in the head. She ends up in a coma, and Bill stops one of the Vipers from killing her in her sleep. Bill thinks that this is something dishonorable, as she’s not awake to fight back. Four years pass, and she wakes up to find out her baby is gone, and a man is about to rape her.

She kills the guy, and then a hospital worker once she finds out he sold her body while she laid there in a coma. Now swearing revenge agains the people who got her here, the Bride heads to the home of one Vernita Green. A former Viper, she now has a daughter and lives in the suburbs.

The two fight until Vernita’s daughter comes home. Then they head into the kitchen, where the Bride kills Vernita after she almost tricks the Bride into a truce. She leaves Vernita’s body with her daughter, telling her that one day she, too, might want to get revenge for what just happened.

The Bride then ventures to Japan, where she finds Hanzo, a renowned swordsmith. There’s one problem: he swore he would never make a sword again. However, she soundly convinces him for a sword after she tells him that she’s going after Bill. Turns out Bill is the guy’s former student.

Her next target is O-Ren Ishii, another former Viper who is now the leader of the Tokyo yakuza. In an animated sequence, we learned that O-Ren’s parents were killed by the mafia when she was a little girl, and she rose to the top of the yakuza in her own revenge story.

The Bride finds her at a restaurant, then takes down O-Ren’s assistant, bodyguard, and group of trained warriors. They then have a duel in the garden, and the Bride slices the top of O-Ren’s head clean off. She then tortures Sofie, the assistant, for the whereabouts of the other Vipers, then leaves her alive.

The movie ends with her departing for the next round of killings, and Bill meets with Sofie. He asks her if the Bride knows if her daughter is still alive, and we have the perfect set up for Part Two here.

Overall Thoughts

Honestly, I thought this movie was just okay. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen so many of these kinds of movies before, but I thought that it was just a classic revenge movie and it wasn’t anything special compared to what I had seen before.

That said, I think this was a special movie when it came out because American movies hadn’t ventured into this kind of territory before. It solidified Tarantino’s reputation, but you could kind of tell he loved Asian movies from some of the motifs, as there are a lot of nods to Japanese cinema throughout.

Like I am glad I watched it, and I can see how someone else would love this movie, but it wasn’t up my alley at the end of the day.

Go watch it though if you haven’t already and are interested in it!

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