1 of 3
Vengeance is ours, saith Hollywood. This message came through particularly loud and clear during a single week in April, in which the studios released three films about grim, determined vigilantes who seek brutal revenge against their enemies. While those who take the law into their own hands are usually anything but heroic in real life, the protagonists in Kill Bill, The Punisher, and Man on Fire are all presented in more or less sympathetic terms. All of their violent vendettas are portrayed as at least somewhat justified, and there even seems to be a hint of divine sanction hanging over their efforts. All three of them have lost a child, and sometimes other friends and family too, and all three of them have been shot and left for dead by the villains who deprived them of their loved ones. Thus, when all three of them recuperate and set out on their quests for vengeance, it is as though they have risen from the dead to set wrongs right.
The implicit divine approval is made explicit in Kill Bill, the two-part Quentin Tarantino movie which freely mixes the conventions of Eastern and Western revenge flicks. The story follows a female assassin, known at first only as The Bride (Uma Thurman), who is shot in the head by Bill (David Carradine), her former boss and lover, and then spends the next four years in a coma. In Vol. 1, released last year, she awakes, beats a hospital employee who has been raping her and pimping her body out to other men, then wills her paralyzed legs back to life. As The Bride sets off on a globe-trotting mission to kill the five former colleagues who killed her friends and caused her to lose the baby she was carrying, she marvels that she survived Bill's attack; in a voice-over, she declares: "When fortune smiles on something as violent and ugly as revenge, it seems proof like no other that not only does God exist—you're doing his will."
As always with Tarantino, it is difficult to tell where hip posturing ends and sincerity begins. The one thing that does come through in his films is his unabashed love for both the artistic ambitions and the pulpy excesses of earlier films, and Kill Bill, divided neatly into ten chapters spread out over two films, is essentially a celebration of movie genres, from Westerns and gangster movies to kung fu flicks and Japanese animation. An opening title card even alludes to Star Trek, citing an "old Klingon proverb" to the effect that "Revenge is a dish best served cold." But there is more to Kill Bill than a mere exercise in style. Tarantino is also concerned with the moral codes by which even criminals try to live, and with the possibility that even sinners as bad as these can find grace.
In a flashback in Vol. 2, we learn that The Bride tried to abandon her life of crime when she learned she was pregnant—and that her first act upon making this discovery was to spare the life of another female assassin who happened to invade her hotel room at that exact moment. The tense, amusing stand-off between these two hit-women recalls an episode in Tarantino's earlier film, Pulp Fiction (1994), in which two hit-men are completely untouched by a virtually point-blank hail of bullets; one calls their survival a "miracle" and gives up his criminal ways, while the other sees nothing but a lucky accident and continues to work for their boss—and is killed on the job shortly thereafter. In that case, we may assume the hit-man who quit was allowed to go, but Bill is not so generous to The Bride; several months after she leaves him, he tracks her down, finds that she is about to marry another man, and kills the wedding party—and almost succeeds in killing her, too. So now, because The Bride's efforts to embrace the good have been thwarted, she goes the other way, embracing evil in order to destroy it, using her lethal talents to kill her former colleagues.
share this page
RSS Feed
