Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
★★★★½ — Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
That nurse whistle. You know the one. It's lodged somewhere behind your eyes right now, isn't it? Good luck shifting it. That single detail tells you everything about what Tarantino is doing here: he's weaponising nostalgia, taking the sounds and textures of decades of grindhouse cinema and kung fu epics and samurai flicks and remixing them into something that feels entirely, gloriously his own. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is loud, bloody, and absolutely magnificent.
Tarantino wears his influences like blood-soaked badges of honour, and he's not shy about it. The spurting arterial sprays are ripped straight from classic samurai pictures. Uma Thurman's yellow tracksuit is an unmistakable nod to Bruce Lee. The whole film is steeped in a genuine reverence for Asian cinema and martial arts epics, and that reverence is infectious. You can feel how much he loves this stuff in every frame, every needle drop, every absurdly choreographed punch. It's the work of a proper film obsessive let loose with a budget and a cast who can keep up.
What makes it more than just an exercise in stylish homage is the controlled chaos underneath. Tarantino blends genres the way some people flick through channels at two in the morning, landing on something brilliant and just leaving it there. There's a revenge thriller in here, a spaghetti western, a martial arts epic, and then, right in the middle of it all, an anime sequence that by any reasonable logic should feel completely out of place. It doesn't. It's daring and it's genius and somehow it makes total sense within the world the film has built for itself.
And then there's the House of Blue Leaves. I'll just say it plainly: that fight sequence is one of the greatest action set pieces ever committed to film. The shift from colour to black and white, the sheer scale of it, the choreography, the audacity of staging something that long and that intricate and making it feel breathless from start to finish. I've seen it more times than I can count and I still feel the same rush. If you want to make a case for film as pure visceral experience, you could start and end right there.
There is one sour note I keep coming back to, and it's nothing to do with the film itself. Tarantino so clearly reveres Bruce Lee here, treats him as an icon worth celebrating, which makes it all the more frustrating that he later chose to caricature and mock him in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019). The contradiction bothers me every time I revisit Vol. 1. But that's a argument for another day.
Taken on its own terms, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is pulpy, adrenaline-fuelled, blood-drenched filmmaking at its most confident. Thurman is ferocious in the lead, the soundtrack does exactly what great film music should do, and the whole thing moves with the swagger of a director who knows precisely what he's making and refuses to apologise for a single frame of it. It sits comfortably alongside Pulp Fiction as proof that Tarantino, when he's firing on all cylinders, is genuinely one of a kind.
Four and a half stars. And yes, who doesn't love a roaring Pussy Wagon? Naturally, you'll want to go straight to Kill Bill: Vol. 2 the moment the credits roll. Don't fight it.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2003 | Watched: 2025-04-02
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: ITVX Premium
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Watch in the US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Quentin Tarantino: Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019) · Inglourious Basterds (2009) · Pulp Fiction (1994) · Reservoir Dogs (1992)
More with Uma Thurman: Pulp Fiction (1994) · Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
