Tarantino's latest exploit

I can't wait for Kill Bill Volume II - if only to discover whether Volume I works. Conceived as one movie (in fact, so rumour has it, the central part of a planned trilogy), Quentin Tarantino's latest film has been split into two due to its length. Thanks to QT's special relationship with producer Harvey Weinstein, the world's most successful movie geek has been able to deliver two movies for the price of one. Or rather, half a movie.

Inspired by Hong Kong Chinese movies about a vengeful figure called the Bride, Tarantino has fashioned a work that trades off many of his favourite cult film styles. This is exploitation run riot, with visual and aural quotes from Sergio Leone's Italian westerns, Seventies blaxploitation flicks, classical ronin movies and kung-fu films. Every moment suggests another movie, even if it is buried deep in the subconscious of the cult cinema-goer. Epically ersatz, this is the movie as palimpsest: scratch the surface and you'll find another film underneath.

First, the narrative. Attacked and left for dead during her wedding rehearsal, the Bride (Uma Thurman) awakes from a five-year coma with a metal plate in her skull and finds she has lost her unborn child. The perpetrators are Bill (David Carradine, heard but not seen in Volume I) and his elite squad of female assassins, The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (bearing strong resemblance to the flying female guards in Jackie Chan's Armour of God), of whom The Bride was a former member.

Escaping from hospital, the Bride sets about tracking down and killing each member of the squad. By the time we have reached the end of Volume I, there are two down (Lucy Liu's O-Ren Ishii and Vivica A Fox's Vernita Green); three to go.

Tarantino plays fast and loose with the narrative arc, shifting the timeline back and forth to deliver pieces of the jigsaw. Like Oliver Stone in Natural Born Killers, he not only employs different film styles for each section but also different media - several sequences are in black-and-white and there is an entire flashback told in anime, the Japanese animated manga.

Technically, the film is a marvel of switching styles and intelligent editing.

It all adds up to an epic pop artefact of indescribable soullessness. By his own admission, Tarantino has attempted (and largely succeeded) in making a movie whose only reality is that of celluloid. Unlike any of his earlier movies, this is entirely prescribed by its own references. Tarantino is not the first to do this, of course: one only has to go back to the French film mavericks of the Eighties to find similar exercises in pure stylistic gloss, such as Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva or Luc Besson's Subway.

Whether Tarantino aspires to something beyond a vacuous exercise in pop cult piracy is questionable, though there are occasional signs of another agenda. The moment The Bride awakens with a jolt and howls in anguish at her empty womb is one of the few instances of genuine emotion; and the last line of Volume I suggests that Volume II will delve deeper into the human condition.

Spruce and lively as Kill Bill is, it does not take us into the new territory that you might expect from the director of Pulp Fiction. The collision between East and West has been done before - notably in the 1971 western Red Sun, which contrived to bring Toshiro Mifune's Samurai warrior into the wild west of Charles Bronson. Moreover, US directors such as Paul Schrader and Samuel Fuller have juxtaposed the American crime film with Japanese gangster movies in films as diverse as the Crimson Kimono and The Yakuza. And Samurai movies themselves have a long legacy of nourishing westerns, from The Seven Samurai (remade as The Magnificent Seven) to Yojimbo (A Fistful of Dollars).

With these movies in mind - and Tarantino will have considered them - he has raised the stakes in the depiction of violence. Gone are the two-gun firefights of Reservoir Dogs; in place of firepower is blade power in the shape of the Bride's custommade samurai sword, forged by legendary swordmaker Hattori Hanzo (Sonny Chiba). Clad in yellow motorcycle leathers beneath which she wears a yellow sweatsuit in a colour-coded tribute to Bruce Lee, The Bride dispatches her opponents with a swish of steel, lopping off arms, hands, feet, heads, splitting torsos and generally causing maximum carnage. Blood doesn't spurt so much as cascade - curtains of red spout across the screen, raining scarlet and soaking anyone in its path. There is even a cameo role for Jun Kunimara, star of Takeshi Miike's Ichi The Killer, considered by many to be the most violent movie ever made.

Tarantino has been especially inventive in selecting his soundtrack; from the credit sequence with Nancy Sinatra singing Sonny and Cher's Bang Bang to the flamenco music that accompanies the final, beautifully staged battle between The Bride and O-Ren Ishii in a snowbound garden, the film is full of aural surprises.