Kill Bill
A woman in a yellow tracksuit walks out of a coma seeking revenge on the people who shot her. Tarantino split one revenge epic across two films, mining 1970s exploitation and martial-arts cinema to create a revenge fantasy that became a dorm-room poster staple.
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill was shot as a single production and split into two volumes by distributor Miramax. Uma Thurman stars as the Bride (code name Black Mamba), a former member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad who awakens from a coma intent on systematic revenge against the squad and its leader, Bill. The film opens with her emerging into a new life, then methodically works through her enemies across the two-movie arc.
Volume 1 opened October 10, 2003 with the biggest opening weekend of Tarantino's career to that point, and went on to gross $180.9 million worldwide on a $30 million budget. The film is a pastiche of grindhouse cinema: Lucy Liu leads the Tokyo yakuza as O-Ren Ishii; the Bride carves through her Crazy 88 bodyguards in an anime sequence by Production I.G.; and the retired sword master Hattori HanzΕ forges the Bride's legendary blade. The yellow tracksuit becomes iconic; the whistled theme unforgettable.
Volume 2 arrived six months later in 2004, finally delivering the confrontation with Bill (David Carradine, kept offscreen for all of Volume 1). The split structure gave the revenge narrative a strange power β the first film is pure kinetic action, the second is almost meditative, an odd mirror structure that feels like two parts of a revenge opera. By the end of 2004, Kill Bill had become the definitive revenge film of its generation.
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