Uma Thurman plays The Bride in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. Photo © Miramax
'Tarantino is not just grinding an 11-year old axe. He is thinking up a new kind of feminine machismo, killing with a tear, though as ruthlessly as and probably more professionally than any of his other hoods yet.'

Kill Bill: Volume One (18)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Reviewed by Steve Tomkins

Tarantino was evidently stung by the criticism - somewhat over-hasty in retrospect - that Reservoir Dogs was a misogynistic film where women only exist to be shot as a passersby.

'The movie practically wears a placard saying Girls Keep Out,' said Ella Taylor in LA Weekly.) He went straight on to give Uma Thurman an excellent major role in Pulp Fiction, among other 'gangsterland girls'; in Jackie Brown he put a girl in the title role.

Now in Kill Bill his female-friendly impulses are as out-of-control as his gore-thirsty ones: Uma Thurman leads as a super-assassin, on the vengeful trail of four other super-assassins (three of them girls) and their boss who rather spoilt her wedding, leaving her in a coma with all her relatives and unborn baby dead. In the process she disposes of a laughable number of would-be killers, of which the only really threatening one is a woman. (And so are half the others.) The one vocal track of the film is by a woman, and even the rock band we meet is all woman. The placard says This Way, Ladies.

Tarantino is not just grinding an 11-year old axe. He is thinking up a new kind of feminine machismo, killing with a tear, though as ruthlessly as and probably more professionally than any of his other hoods yet.

Pulp Fiction was a unique film in its fascination with what gangsters do when they are not killing - what they talk about in the car, in the lift, in the diner, what they read on the toilet. That powerful incongruity between the everyday and the horribly violent gets a stunning womanly reworking in the first chapter of Kill Bill, when Thurman and her first victim, 'Copperhead', at a crucial point in their house-wrecking bash, have to break off to deal with the arrival of the school bus. As so often in Tarantino, it's that stand-off, the psychological tussle, that's far more gripping than any actual bloodletting.

Talking of which, you will have heard that quite a lot of blood got let in this movie. You can read my take on Kill Bill and movie violence here. If you don't choose to, all I'll say here is that Thurman's stand against 100 sword-wielding bad guys and girls, is every bit as tiresome and rather more laughable than Neo's trouncing of 100 Agent Smiths in Matrix Reloaded - and several billion times more gruesome. But, again like Pulp Fiction with its basement of horrors, the bloodiest bits of the film are not the worst. The sickening idea - here involving Thurman's coma treatment - though not seen, is vastly more stomach-churning than any ketchup explosion.

The other thing Tarantino's films are infamous for is their swearing. Kill Bill does not let the side down here either, and for once this is a real weakness. We cross quite a range of scenes from American hospitals to Japanese councils dripping with etiquette, and yet every character talks in Tarantino's trademark LA gangster four-letter punctuation. A little differentiation of character would be nice.

It's also a trifle annoying that we only get to see Kill Bill Vol. 1. Does no one make films with endings any more? Now I'm waiting to see The Return of the King (eagerly), Matrix Revolutions (hardly daring to hope that it might make up for Reloaded), whatever the next Harry Potter is called (for the wife really), and Kill Bill Vol. 2. Nothing in Vol. 1 justifies this. There's some great cinema here - the domestic scenes with 'Copperhead' are well-worthy of Pulp Fiction. And there's plenty of good stuff, but you could have cut half an hour without hurting it. From what we've seen so far, the two parts should certainly have been edited down to one. I guess there aren't many people that would tell Quentin Tarantino, "Cut".

Don't let children see it, obviously, unless you're running some evil psychological experiment. Don't let anyone under the age of thirty see it, or anyone remotely squeamish, unstable, easily offended, impressionable or principled, or anyone who hasn't already seen Pulp Fiction - and enjoyed it - or anyone who thought Die Hard was "a bit unsuitable". But see it yourself, obviously.

• A necessary evil? - violence in films

Other ways to help Christian Aid