Kill Bill volume 1

Reviewed by RUSSELL BAILLIE

Herald rating: * * *

Kill Bill, as anyone who has put a microphone in front of director Quentin Tarantino has heard, is his chance to pay tribute to all those B to Z-grade genres he so loves.

"This is my Yakuza film. It's my Samurai movie, my revenge movie, my bad-ass chick movie, my spaghetti western and my comic-book movie all in one," he told TimeOut the other week. But who would have picked him for a Monty Python fan?

For when it gets to the really big swordfight and blood and bits of baddie are flying everywhere, it's hard not to think this is Tarantino's homage to the classic Python "Anyone for tennis?" sketch.

There, the participants of an English country garden party suffer one unfortunate amputation after another, complete with splurting arteries. It might sound nasty but it's hilarious and surreal.

So, too, is Kill Bill's big finale - well, at least the ending of its Volume 1 - as Uma Thurman elegantly hacks through wave after wave of masked Japanese henchmen and a few henchwomen.

But if the final reels of part one of Kill Bill are a bloody great thrill, getting there sure can set pulses slowing.

Tarantino's storytelling might use chapters to flash backwards and forwards as we discover the reasons behind the bride's need for revenge and her intended victims, but it still feels tediously linear.

And as he flicks between genres - at one point devoting a chunk of a movie to a gruesome anime telling of why Yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii (Liu) turned out the way she did - it feels as inspired as a shopping list.

Likewise, when the bride turns up in Okinawa to get a weapon from a local swordmaster (Chiba), the scenes seem more concerned with giving Tarantino a chance to honour his favourite Japanese star than keeping the story moving along.

The bride is out for revenge after being left for dead on her wedding day by her colleagues in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, headed by the Bill of the title.

She wakes from a coma four years later to find her baby gone, and that her unconscious body has been pimped out by a hospital orderly - how we find this out is the ugliest part of this violent movie and makes you think that even if Tarantino has made women the heroes and villains of this, he still seems to possess a cruel misogynist streak.

As for his leading lady, Thurman is quite fabulous throughout - whether she's in a one-on-one knife fight in a suburban living room at the beginning of the film or desiccating an entire nightclub at the other end.

But even her edgy efforts aren't enough to make you care much about anything in this crazy, violent patchwork of a film or raise much interest - worryingly, given that Volume 2 is four months away - in how it might end.

Cast: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, David Carradine, Sonny Chiba Director: Quentin Tarantino

Running Time: 93 mins

Rating: R18 (graphic violence, sexual references, offensive language)

Screening: Village, Hoyts cinemas