Kill Bill Volume 1: Uma Thurman Kills Bill... and everyone else

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Two years and several reviews later I think it may just be time to return to my not so continuous marathon review chain of Quentin Tarantino's directorial career. And what better way to make my glorious comeback than with a double "bill", see what I did there, review special of the two movies that truly broke QT out into the mainstream, making him an icon of action lovers and the bane of weak stomached movie censors worldwide.

Kill Bill: Volume 1

The story of "Kill Bill" is one of ruthless, beautifully choreographed revenge where Uma Thurman’s enigmatic character, “The Bride”, takes centre stage as she travels the world inadvertently and singlehandedly ending global over-population, whilst all the time enacting brutal retribution against her former friends and fellow assassins for an incident several years before hand that left her entire family dead and a steel plate embedded in her skull. As we quickly come to realize, from an opening scene involving a ninja knife fight, equal parts frantic and vicious, as well as the decimation of a picturesque small town America home "The Bride" means business, as does Tarantino.

From the opening of this thrilling introductory chapter to the closing credits Tarantino's trademark artistic flourishes and constant film references are comfortingly present throughout. The action is ludicrously OTT, or should I say QTT mwahah... sorry. This is especially true during the famed "Crazy 88" fight scene in which Thurman becomes a samurai sword wielding, florescent jumpsuit wearing human blender. This flamboyant spectacle is one of the standout moments of Tarantino’s career with an FX budget larger than most countries GDP. Each cast member is rapidly reduced to nothing more than a ketchup filled sprinkler system as Tarantino ensures that any Jam manufacturers in the area will be getting new Ferraris for Christmas. This particular marathon fight scene along with several others throughout the film display the full extent of QT's technical directing prowess as well as establishing him as a truly exceptional action coordinator, ranking amongst those whose work he is overtly paying tribute to. Uma Thurman gives a cooler than an ice cube with a penchant for madmen suits performance, whilst Lucy Lui is equally cold and intimidating as a mass murdering, racially sensitive Triad Boss decapitating her way to the top of the Hong Kong criminal underworld.

No one. Touched. The jumpsuit.

However the only enemy character development, beyond that of the superficial, comes in the form of a series of awkward anime flashbacks, conveying the sense that Tarantino is trying a little too hard to honour Japanese cinema, not only putting it on a pedestal but offering a back massage and a reach around. The major protagonists are for the most part forgettable, acting simply as an array of human obstacles for "The Bride" to make into racially diverse Sushi in gradually more violent and imaginative ways. The subtle, quirky comedy is also missing, except for a mentally scarring yet darkly hilarious hospital scene. Whilst the action scenes are constant shots of hyper-stylised adrenaline no amount of lighting and visual trickery or Samurai movie homages can make up for the lack of Tarantino's trademark quote it till it hurts dialogue or endearing characters that we've come to love and, perhaps unfairly, expect.

Once all the smoke has cleared and the tsunami of blood and prosthetic limbs has been cleaned away I was left, like many of Thurman's less fortunate victims, feeling slightly hollow. 6 stars out of 10.

HANNA: Wright and Ronan, Together Again

Yes it has been a while. How long has it been? 1... 2 weeks... OK so a couple of years have gone by since my last review and I would like to be able say that up until now no film has truly compelled me to put fingers to keyboard and let flowery metaphor after metaphor erupt from my pretentious "mindhole" like a flamboyant volcanic thesaurus. Sadly however that is not the case. My distinct lack of activity has been down to a combination of work, sadly taking priority over a film blog vanity project, combined with my own heroic laziness(mostly the second one). But I'm back and will hopefully be supplying you, all two and a half of my loyal followers, with almost weekly reviews providing my cramped schedule of angry birds and googling my own name allows... But enough introduction, on with the review!

"HANNA", the 4th feature film of Joe Wright's impressive career, is similarly to its protagonist and namesake entirely unexpected, FREAKIN INCREDIBLE! and... um... strangely attractive. Ok so maybe I'm stretching the comparison between the film itself and its central anti-heroine a little far but it doesn't change the fact that this remains, in my humble blogger opinion, easily the greatest achievement of Mr Wrights up till now stellar, but samey career. HANNA is quite frankly pure unadulterated, often disturbing fun. It's clear from the opening, in which an Arctic based Hanna (Ronan)shoots a deer in the face before having a brutal fist fight with her animal skin clad father figure, that this is not going to be another awkward Victorian flirting and drawing room bitch fest that some may have come to expect from Wright, director of "Atonement" and "Pride and Prejudice".

Eskimos didn't take kindly to cameras

The film focuses on, surprise surprise, Hanna a teenage assassin and her unending pursuit for revenge for the brutal death of her mother. HANNA's relentless, asthma inducing pace is introduced at the beginning and doesn't slow throughout somehow managing to combine an array of face meltingly awesome fight and chase montages with tender at times revelatory character development. This is helped in no small part by Ronan's startlingly effective as well as convincing portrayal of a teenage assassin stuck between being a child and a robot like killing machine with a thing for pointy objects and turning people into human kebabs. In fact its unfair to give all the acting credit to Ronan, however great she was and however huge my nerd crush for her is credit must go to pretty much every member of the cast each giving standout performances and all worthy of a cavalcade of unnecessarily elaborate adjectives to describe their individual character portrayal, with a personal favorite being the heroically creepy Isaacs or "Sandman" played by the ever reliable and in this case eye opening Tom Hollander, lets just say I wont be getting much sleep tonight. However the two greatest aspects of "HANNA" as a whole were more technically focused, these being the cinematography as well as the shot composition making nearly every shot simply look like it should be hanging in an art gallery. HANNA's visuals truly stick in your mind long after you've switched off your TV and, in my case, gone foetul on the floor from sheer sensory overload. The second of these feats of technical wizardry is of course the mind blendingly, seizure inducingly glorious Chemical Brothers soundtrack helping to give each scene its setting, emotional charge and drive as well as beating half of your senses into bloody submission, causing some serious emotional numbness for sometime after viewing. Just listening to the soundtrack now I'm having to intersperse it with "The Archers" omnibus just to balance out adrenaline levels.

Despite a slightly lazily un-concluded family side story and a lack of any kind of moral amongst the continuous waves of stylized violence this is one of the most cohesive, exciting and technically dazzling thrillers I've seen in a very long time.
Maybe its cause it's my first review in a while or the fact that my brain was turned into ready break by the relentless score but I'm feeling generous 8/10!