Writer-Director Quentin Tarantino is back with a vengeance although it is not his that is getting all the kicks in Kill Bill Vol. 1, a martial arts playhouse for Uma Thurman (from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction) and her consorts played by Vivica A Fox and Lucy Lui accompanied by a host of Japanese nightclub purveyors in the much talked about brilliant climatic show down.

After directing his last film Jackie Brown, which was released in 1997, Tarantino has created not his best but certainly a hit. This is a one idea film – the revenge of the central character, The Bride, performed by Thurman – but it’s funny, ironic, action packed with deftly orchestrated fight scenes that doesn’t make the women in its world look second in line to the men (ala Thelma and Louise), a technically proficient innovative cocktail that makes most of 2003’s summer blockbuster movies look so very formulaic.

The Bride wants to start a new life as an ordinary woman as she is expecting a child, but she is gunned down at her Texas wedding by assassins, the people she has left behind from her past. She slips into a coma for four years until a mosquito, in an ethereal touch, wakes her up by biting her while she lays in hospital. Escaping the hospital, where she’s been raped in a scheme set up for profit by the male nurse, she recovers her facilities to vow revenge on the murder of her child, the violation of her being, and for ruining the best day of her life, and rather exaggerated is the graphic nature of the subsequent outlandish violence.

A homage to kung fu movies, Tarantino takes on a different role to that of mastermind of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, films that also stuck with a nonlinear narrative but which were underground movies with gritty and edgy styles and characters. Kill Bill Vol 1 is more polished than the latter films, it intricately weaves its technical style in show stopping fashion, and being a martial arts action homage the director is invigorating his skills in a new genre he’s tackling and that he loves. Tarantino succeeds in making a convincing fantasy.

The Bride’s central target is Bill (David Carradine, his presence a nod to a kung fu television series he starred in from the 1970s). Initially she targets Vernita Green (Fox) and O-Ren Ishii (Lui).

On the way to Tokyo, where O-Ren Ishii heads an underground organisation, she stops off at a Japanese island to procure a sword from martial arts master Sonny Chiba (Hattori Hanzo). The scenes Thurman and Hanzo have together are funny and poignant. We see a relaxed Bride and the martial arts expert Sonny gets to explain in fatherly and poetic tones the philosophy behind her quest for revenge, which is painted somewhat more seriously than the rest of the film’s subtle underlining comic demeanour, but which convinces dramatically.

The animated sequence which explains the back story to The Bride’s target, O-Ren Ishii, has been criticised for its overt violence. It’s an effective sequence, however, and the animation keeps us at a distance while still being noticeable because of its unique positioning in a live action story. The back story is actually moving, which describes O-Ren’s sexual abuse as a child to a Japanese criminal, and her life as an assassin when an adult. This is where we see females as victims to the male’s dominance, but which is overturned when the females get in positions of power, and the film doesn’t shy from sympathetically portraying The Bride and O-Ren.