I can’t remember having such a good time in the theater in a long time. This is entertainment in its highest (and yet most basic) form. Is there any real intellectual content? No. Any moral message to be had from it all? Quentin might say there is, but no, there’s not. There’s nothing beyond the surface here, but ah, what a surface it is.

This is style, all style and only style. Though based on no comic book that I’m aware of, this is the comic-book movie to end all comic-book movies. In fact, you might say, this is the first time a comic book has actually been made a motion picture.

The story is relatively simple, though it’s made out as complicated as possible through it’s non-linear telling. The Bride (Uma Thurman) was once a member of a secret assassination squad and in a relationship with its leader, Bill (David Carradine). After getting pregnant she runs away, deciding that she doesn’t want her child to grow up in the assassinating culture. Just as she’s about to get married to another man, Bill and the assassination squad fall on the party, killing everyone and causing the Bride to go unconscious for four year. When the Bride wakes up, she decides to hunt down and kill all of the members of the squad: O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), Budd (Michael Madsen), Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), and, of course, Bill.

One by one, she knocks them off, each with a ferocious battle and plenty of style. It’s like the X-Men meet Ocean’s Eleven. Each scene presents something new to look at. From whole portions done in black and white or animated to minor elements such as the bleeping out of the Bride’s name whenever it’s spoken or the siren that whales whenever the Bride remembers something from before her coma, Kill Bill is constantly having fun.

While Volume One is virtually non-stop action, Volume Two slows things down and tries to pretend like there’s some sort of emotional content to the production. There’s not. The good parts of Vol. Two should have been plucked out and placed at the end of Vol. One to create a single epic.

About the violence. Kill Bill is violent. Flauntingly violent. Indeed, even enjoyable violent. Paradoxically, I’d be the last to say it actually glorified violence. The constant cutting, shooting and killing is unremorseful, incessant and way over the top. The comic bookish action is never believable and so never really affecting. While watching, I was reminded of Hot Shots! Part Deux, where the death totals tallied up at the bottom of the screen and then claimed to be the most violent movie ever, after a certain total was reached.

Kill Bill’s violence is usually laughable (I mean that literally, I was laughing out loud) and so lighthearted it’s hard to really take it seriously. Furthermore, this is clearly satire. Violent movies of decades past seem to be mercilessly mocked in a portrayal of violence that intentionally lacks proper justification.

On the other hand, it is cool. And that’s the problem. It all looks so cool. I don’t believe for a moment that kids are going to pick up swords and start chopping off each others heads in response to it, but it’s still problematic theoretically. As farcical as it is, I don’t buy claims that the film is actually anti-violence. Kill Bill loves its violence. It soaks in it.

What we have here, I believe, is something that transcends claims of being either violence-promoting or non-violence promoting. This is simply a movie made by a little kid who reads comic books and wanted to do something that looks cool. And that’s exactly what he did.

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