Kill Bill Vol.1/Kill Bill Vol.2 (Box Set) (DVD)

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Loved it
Story	Good
Characters / Performances	Outstanding
Special Effects	Outstanding
Soundtrack	Outstanding

Advantages:	Great entertainment
Disadvantages:	Some might find the films too violent

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Ok so my title might not be very inspired but it's the title track of the film which I thought was fantastic and a clue to what the film's are about...

After hearing so much about Kill Bill, Tarantino's fourth film, over the last couple of years, I caved and bought myself this 2 DVD box set from Amazon thinking I'd at least enjoy it somewhat and maybe even want to watch it again in the future.

WHAT ARE THE FILMS ABOUT?

Basically the 2 films are about "The Bride", a professional assassin, who wakes up in hospital after a 4 year coma and goes on a killing spree. She's determined to kill the 4 people she believes are responsible for putting her in hospital as well as for killing her unborn baby, fiancé and people present for her wedding including the reverend and his wife. It seems Bill, her ex boss was not happy with her getting married and leaving the "gang" to get married and live her life as a "normal person" so arranged for the slaughter of everyone at the wedding.

"The Bride" goes about getting her revenge in a bloodthirsty way and it has to be seen to be believed how she avenges those who wronged her and how she deals with Bill in the climax of Kill Bill 2.

WHO'S IN THEM?

Uma Thurman stars as The Bride/Kiddo with Bill Carradine as the elusive Bill, Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii, Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver, Michael Madsen as Budd, Vivica Fox as Vernita Green, Julie Dreyfus as Sofie, Chiaki Kuriyama as Gogo, Sonny Chiba as Hattori Hanzo and Gordon Liu as Pai Mei (and weirdly enough Johnny Mo)!

WHAT DID I THINK OF THEM?

I vaguely knew what the films were about before I watched them but hadn't realised that I would have been really stumped with the storyline if I had only watched the first film without having the second instalment to watch straight after! I am not Tarantino's greatest fan by any means but have seen several of his films over the years and particularly enjoyed Reservoir Dogs, From Dusk Till Dawn and Jackie Brown. This isn't particularly relevant but I just wanted to explain why I went out and brought the 2 film DVD set without having first seen the films on TV as I usually do with other movies.

Well I have to admit that I feel my purchase of the 2 DVD set wasn't a waste of money. I did really enjoy the films although I'm not generally a fan of so much blood and violence in movies. Having watched Kill Bill through till the end I was very eager to pop the second instalment into the DVD player to find out what happened next.

Uma Thurman as The Bride/Kiddo was pretty amazing. I can't imagine any other Hollywood actress pulling off this role as she did. To say she kicked a LOT of @$$ in this film would be putting it lightly. It was extremely far-fetched but the action scenes were pretty amazing to watch in general (if you try to block out of your mind just how unrealistic it all was). Some of the scenes almost looked like extremely well choreographed dance scenes and the background music fit in with it all perfectly to add to the atmosphere. One can only assume Thurman went through a lot of training to perform those moves (obviously stunt doubles must have been used for some of the more elaborate action scenes. The film is fast-moving from start to finish in both instalments and I didn't really feel there were any scenes that could have been cut to make the story shorter without losing something important from the plot.

The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad consists of Bill, Kiddo, O-Ren Ishii, Elle Driver, Budd and Vernita Green.

Vernita Green aka Copperhead is the first person we see The Bride go after once recovered from her long coma and their fight scene is one of the earliest in the films. It all takes place in a suburban house, mostly the living room and the kitchen but stops halfway as Green's 4 year old daughter comes home. Both The Bride and Copperhead hide their weapons behind their backs despite the place being a total mess from their fight and the fact that they are covered in blood and the child is calmly asked to go up to her bedroom which I found to be oddly amusing but rather charming in a way. A strange calm ensues and the women go to the kitchen, converse and off they go again, our Thurman's character really shows how deadly serious she is when she tells her Copperhead that parading her small daughter around in front of her is not going to change her mind about killing her. Vivica Fox probably had the shortest role in the film out of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad but she was definitely fit for the role!

O-Ren aka Cottonmouth played by Lucy Liu gets much more screen time and her history oh how she became an assassin is shown in flashback in anime which was really cool and fantastically done. Her character is half Japanese, half Chinese American and she gets to be the Queen of crime in Tokyo, what an accolade for someone so young, but she's deadly. She is flanked by a 17 year old girl Gogo, her personal bodyguard, who looks like a sweet innocent schoolgirl, even to the extent of dressing like one, but who is as deadly as her mistress. Lucy Liu was fantastic in her role, I gasped when her character slices off someone's head for mentioning her mixed parentage and then proceeds to tell a boardroom full of bad guys very calmly with a sweet smile on her face that she is ready for any kind of feedback from them (with her right hand woman Sofie translating in Japanese as she speaks) but any mention of her mixed heritage will make her start collecting their heads! Thurman's fight scene with Liu was a work of art, out in a beautiful snowy setting and their fight was like a spectacular dance, nothing less than amazing! Before The Bride gets to fight O-Ren she has to get past Gogo, Sofie and members of the Crazy 88 in elaborate fight scenes that seemed to go on forever!

I was rather disappointed with Michael Madsen's role in the films, he is a Tarantino regular but I'm not really enamoured of him. I found his character in the films to be the blandest of the lot and the least important to some degree but others might feel differently. It was extremely bizarre to see Darryl Hannah in such a role, she wears an eye patch throughout the film and it's not till her showdown with The Bride that we learn what happened to her eye. If you're used to seeing Darryl Hannah in quite gentle, ladylike and soft roles, you're in for a shock. She plays the complete opposite of her normal roles here and I felt she carried it off rather well.

David Carradine is seen on and off during the two films - in flashback mode and present day mode. Carradine is someone I remember from my childhood watching him in the TV series Kung Fu which I thoroughly enjoyed. In recent years, he has often been typecast as the villain in films and TV series and his role in Kill Bill is quite difficult to really categorise. Is he a villain? Or really the head of a gang (albeit an assassination squad yes but still someone with feelings) whose emotions got the better of it which led to his doing what he did to The Bride? Can you believe this guy was 67-68 when he did Kill Bill and he was pretty good in the action scenes, pretty good going for someone his age. Also not surprising that he won Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor and was nominated for Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor.

I thought I might add here that there's even something in Kill Bill Volume 1 for fans of anime, which I personally haven't had much experience of. When we learn of how O-Ren Ishii becomes the deadly assassin and underworld leader that she becomes, the flashback scenes are done in anime. I'm no expert but I thought these were done extremely well and had great impact in the film.

Oh and in case you were wondering, when it comes to background music used in films, I'm not a great fan but I did enjoy ALL of the music used in the Kill Bill films, especially the title track "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" by Nancy Sinatra - I thought it was a fabulously apt song as the title track!

DVD EXTRAS

My 2 DVD boxset is clearly marked that the films are suitable only for people ages 18 or oever. The first volume has a yellow cover with Thurman in a figure hugging yellow catsuit brandishing a long sword. When you insert the DVD within a few moments you hear some dramatic music with anime down the left hand side of the screen and the option of choosing Play, Set Up, Scene Selection or Bonus Features. I hope it's fairly obvious to you what Play and Scene Selection do but just so you know; when you select Set Up, the screen changes to let you choose Languages or Subtitles. Within Languages the only options available are English or English DTS (for DTS you need to have a DTS compatible player, otherwise you would have to choose Dolby Digital soundtrack). Within Subtitles you can select English, English for the hearing impaired or None.

Let's get back to the stuff that you really want to know about in this section and that's the Bonus Features, the first of which is The Making of Kill Bill. This starts off with random action scenes from the film as an intro and then starts with Tarantino saying he came up with the idea of doing a revenge movie with an assassin theme and how he thought about using Thurman as the lead ever since he worked with her in Pulp Fiction.

Throughout this feature Tarantino discusses each of the main characters in the film with their name and their codename and their profession, such as Hattori Hanzo, the Man From Okinawa, a retired Japanese Sword Maker who The Bride visits to bring out of retirement to make her a brand new toy - the deadliest of swords he ever made!

I could go on and on about the extras which I found quite entertaining to watch personally but then you wouldn't need to buy the 2 DVD box set yourself to see for yourself.

TO CONCLUDE

To be quite frank I am not sure why anyone would buy one Kill Bill DVD without the other as doing a quick bit of research on the net or just talking to people who've seen the films will let you know that you need to watch the second one to make sense of it all. I would say that overall it's an extremely violent film and will really only appeal to fans of Tarantino films and fans of fast moving action films - not that I am a great fan of either but I am happy to give this film a strong 9 out of 10. I really enjoyed it all for some reason, even if the violence did make me cringe several times. I just found it overall to be quite a well directed and acted film all round with some spectacular action scenes especially in the second half of the first film which was probably my favourite from the two films as a whole.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

Run time: Kill Bill volume 1 & 2 = 242 minutes
Film Release Date(s): Kill Bill 1 = October 2003, Kill Bill 2 = April 2004
DVD Release Date: Jan 2005
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Producer: Lawrence Bender
Music by: Robert Rodriguez
Cinematography: Robert Richardson
Art Direction: Daniel Bradford (both films) & Hidefumi Hanatani (volume 1 only)
Certification: 18