Volume One doesn't waste valuable screen time on such distractions as narrative and character. Instead, the film is a string of increasingly brutal fight scenes, chapter headed and kinetically delivered in a grab-bag of styles designed to alienate audience involvement. I was constantly reminded that I am watching a movie — severed limbs spray Pythonesque fountains of blood, the screen switches from colour to black and white and into silhouette, the slaughter of a little girl's parents is presented as Japanese anime, and so on. Nothing new in this technique, of course. Alienation is a well-worn trope of both theatre and the movies, and college professors can no doubt look forward to an avalanche of earnest dissertations naming Quentin as the new Bertolt Brecht. The trouble is, Kill Bill's relentless parade of conjuring tricks doesn't have any purpose. It's just there because, you know, it's, you know, cool. It is as if Tarantino has taken all the comic book glories that fuelled his 14-year-old self and thrown them at the screen in a masturbatory frenzy without a thought for drama, suspense or even coherence. The result is a barely watchable mess, a tangled montage of fashion gloss streaked in gore, a cocktail party in an abattoir. There's nothing to get a handle on. Instead of a character, Uma Thurman's athletic Bride gets a set of hot motorcycle leathers and a sword. Her opponents are little more than blood bags to be punctured. Much has been said about "cartoon" violence, but the flying limbs and claret are only half the story. Kill Bill is extraordinarily cruel to its heroine. Whenever the movie slows down (and it slows down a lot) Tarantino throws in a flashback of her wedding day assault and battery, shot in loving, leering close-up. She awakes from a five-year coma to discover that she has been regularly raped. Unforgivably, this revelation is played for gross-out laughs. Because of Tarantino's unassailable reputation as the enfant terrible of cinema and scourge of old farts everywhere, any criticism tends to be dismissed as reactionary harrumphing. But if that's the penalty for naming Kill Bill: Volume 1 as a disaster, the seeping discharge of a mind that knows everything about cinema but nothing about why it matters... if that's the penalty, bring it on.

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