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YMMV / Kill Bill

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  • Accidental Innuendo: Taken out of context, Gogo Yubari's line before fighting Black Mamba sounds like something straight of an S&M porno.
    Gogo: You call that begging? You can beg better than that!
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Pai Mei is by all accounts a supreme Jerkass, but when training his students, how much of his dickery is an act? He might be purposefully demeaning to strip them of their egos and toughen them mentally and physically. And despite being presented as a racist misogynist, he still trained (and later respected) the Bride. He even taught the Bride the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, an implied rarity if ever done.
    • Is Gogo personally loyal to O-Ren like Sofie, or does she just work for her so she can get paid to kill people?
    • Did Bill provide his and the Bride's daughter a normal childhood because he genuinely felt she deserved a life away from the bloodshed, or to show the Bride that she was wrong in thinking he couldn't turn his back on their past life of killing? While B.B. seems pretty well-adjusted, some of her more unsettling qualities, like her finding Shogun Assassin to be a nice bedtime story, or her treatment of her goldfish Emilio, indicates that he might not have been truly invested in keeping her from turning violent.
  • Angst? What Angst?:
    • While it's probably because she's too shocked to react to her mother being killed right in front of her, Vernita's daughter doesn't look too upset about it.
      • She might also have ASPD, which would prevent her from feeling such emotions, and also laying a foundation for the possible sequel where Elle or Sofie find Nikki, and help her get revenge on Beatrix, and Nikki would agree due to her anti-social tendencies.
    • When the Bride finally meets Bill, at no point does he mention the fact that his own brother is dead thanks to her.
      • Although, since Elle was the one who actually killed Budd before Beatrix could fight him, Bill may have found out somehow and rightfully put the blame on Elle instead. Then again, it seems that the only way he could have known about that was if Elle survived and went to tell him about it, which is unlikely, meaning he still should have been assuming that the Bride did it anyway. Alternatively, since Bill and his daughter seem to have been expecting the Bride, maybe Esteban gave them advance warning, and hearing that the Bride was still alive tipped Bill off that Elle's story was bullshit.
  • Anti-Climax Boss: After two films' worth of buildup, the Bride's showdown with Bill is over quickly and isn't any kind of grand duel. There was supposed to be something that resembled much more of a Duel to the Death on a beach (as Bill references), but due to budget and timing constraints, it wasn't filmed and we got the version in the final film instead.
  • Award Snub: Uma Thurman was snubbed twice for Best Actress at the Academy Awards. So was David Carradine for Supporting Actor for Volume 2, which was his career's best in many critics' opinions.
  • Better on DVD: There are so many small details in both movies that can only be caught after several viewings.
    • And thanks to the advent of Blu-ray, there's a cheapie release that allows you to watch both volumes back to back, without even having to change discs. What it lacks in special features, it makes up for with said gimmick.
  • Complete Monster: Volume 1:
    • "Chapter 2: The blood-splattered BRIDE": Buck, despite his short appearance, makes himself known as one of the most disgusting characters in the film. A perverted hospital orderly, Buck has been sadistically raping the comatose Bride for four years, all the while he sells her body to other rapists for money, which he uses for his luxury car.
    • "Chapter 3: The Origin of O-Ren": Boss Matsumoto was a sadistic, pedophilic Yakuza boss, and the one responsible for O-Ren Ishii's life as an assassin. Invading O-Ren's home when she was nine, Matsumoto has his men fight and kill her father, laughing as he dies. Taking O-Ren's mom, he tosses her on her bed and fatally stabs her with his katana, almost killing O-Ren herself, who was hiding under the bed. With business settled, Matsumoto and his gang set the house on fire. Frequently using young girls as prostitutes, O-Ren is able to assassinate him by posing as one, appealing to Matsumoto's perverse lust.
  • Creepy Awesome: A few examples from both films. There's O-Ren, Go-Go Yubari, and the Yakuza man who kills O-Ren's father, as well as Elle Driver and Budd to a degree.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: The Crazy 88 fight. A guy gets his foot sliced off; seconds later he's seen pressing it back to the bloody stump, as if it's going to magically reattach. Another guy gets his eye snatched out (in a bit of foreshadowing concerning where she learned this technique); when the Bride is overlooking the carnage, he's still stumbling around blindly (and is rumored to be a cameo by Tarantino). The uncensored fight shows the Bride taking said eye and throwing it down another man's throat, with Sofia flinching and looking away in disgust.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Gogo Yubari, despite being portrayed as an Axe-Crazy Psychopathic Womanchild with no sympathetic traits. Some even feel sorry for the Psycho for Hire when she's killed.
    • Despite only appearing in a handful of flashbacks in part two, Pai Mei is, without question, one of the most popular characters in the film. He’s actually a stock character from Chinese martial arts films, but is largely unknown in America apart from this film.
    • Budd. Despite looking like nothing more than a dumb redneck hick who you'd expect the Bride to slash through in seconds, he's one of the more memorable characters in the films, thanks to his competence, moral complexity, and Michael Madsen's grittily noble performance.
  • Fanfic Fuel: The number of loose ends that the movies have provides tons of opportunity to further explore unfinished plotlines: Beatrix giving Vernita’s daughter permission to hunt her down and try to kill her once she grows up; O-Ren’s Dragon, Sofie Fatale, surviving the slaughter of O-Ren’s faction and probably wanting revenge at some point for the death of her friend and losing her arm; Elle’s death not being outright confirmed; and the future of Beatrix and her own child, considering the possibility of at least three people having very good reason to want to track her down and kill her for revenge. If a follow-up movie is never made, these dangling plot threads are all great bait for Fan Fic sequel hooks.
  • Fan-Preferred Cut Content:
    • There was a badass fight scene between David Carradine and Michael Jai White that sadly ended up on the cutting room floor.
    • The Bride and Bill were originally supposed to have a final showdown on a beach, with her in her wedding dress and him in a tuxedo. It certainly sounds more exciting than the rather anti-climactic resolution in the final film.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • The Bride taking a katana onboard a passenger airplane is odd in a world of heightened airport security.
    • Although she doesn't get as much development as the other Vipers, Vernita is actually similar to the Bride. She left the Deadly Vipers for the same exact reasons as Beatrix; perhaps the only reason she was allowed to leave unharmed was because her child wasn't Bill's, and/or because she handed in a formal resignation of sorts instead of just faking her death like the Bride did. When you consider that her own daughter is around the same age as B.B., Vernita may have also been pregnant when she played her role in the Two Pines Wedding Chapel massacre. This may explain why the Bride gets so pissed when Vernita attempts to use being a mother as a reason not to be killed and cold-bloodedly shuts her down.
    • The Bride's monologue in the convertible at the beginning of Vol. 2 takes a whole new meaning after Uma Thurman revealed that she believed the crash she suffered while filming it was not an accident and was connected to her abuse by Harvey Weinstein.
    • The Bride's storyline of being raped and her body being taken advantage of is painful enough after stories about the abuse Weinstein and Tarantino inflicted on Uma Thurman were made public, but in 2018 a woman in Arizona gave birth despite having been in a coma for the majority of her life, which made the plot point regarding the Bride giving birth to a live baby in her coma all the more gut-wrenching.
  • Les Yay: O-Ren Ishii and Sofie Fatale. The Bride (who knew both of them before the El Paso murders) seems to understand that hurting Sofie is one of the few things that can cause O-Ren's composure to slip, if only for a moment. It also doesn't hurt that O-Ren is an Expy of the titular character in Lady Snowblood, who's definitely into women. And (unwise as it may be) Sofie remains defiant even after being stuffed in the trunk of a car and having her arm cut off, but after the Bride tells her that O-Ren is dead... she appears deeply shaken and has clearly been crying.
  • Magnificent Bastard: The Bride fights many devious opponents, and is a devious opponent herself, but the following stand out with charm matching their skill:
    • The Bride, aka "Black Mamba" and Beatrix Kiddo, was once the deadliest and most favored assassin of Bill, as well as his lover, and she became pregnant with his child. Not wanting the baby raised in Bill's murderous world, she fled to live a quiet life until Bill led a massacre of her wedding reception. Waking up from a coma four years later, she begins a revenge-fueled rampage against Bill and the Vipers, using extensive information gathering, brutal pragmatism in combat, and her skills with a katana to kill them all one by one. Even when caught in a trap by Budd, Bill's brother, the Bride claws her way out of a buried coffin and walks barefoot through the desert back to his trailer to pluck the remaining eye from her hated rival Elle Driver. In the emotional climax, she discovers Bill had been raising her child these four years, and regretfully kills him to attain her vengeance and raise their daughter in peace.
    • Bill himself, AKA "Snakecharmer", is the retired leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. After his lover leaves him and becomes engaged to another man while pregnant with his child, Bill massacres the wedding party and leaves the Bride in a coma. Deciding to leave her alive in the hospital, he took their child, who she gave birth to while unconscious, and raised her for four years as a loving father. When she finally comes to confront him, the three share a family night together of a life that could have been, while Bill also leads the Bride into a false sense of security, shooting her with truth serum to have her admit to him and herself why she left him. Accepting defeat with grace, Bill reassures her that she's his favourite person, never stopping loving her and regretting what he did, telling her "I... overreacted."
    • Vol. 1: O-Ren Ishii, AKA "Cottonmouth" of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, is the most ambitious of Bill's former underlings. Starting her career at age eleven by avenging her parents' death at the hands of yakuza, O-Ren went on to be one of the world's most dangerous women. After leaving Bill's employ following the wedding massacre, O-Ren travelled to Japan, conquering the criminal underworld and rising to the top of the yakuza, feared and respected by the bosses of the families. Confronted by the Bride, O-Ren sends her underlings to fight her before engaging her in single combat, admitting respect for her opponent as the fight closes. The most successful of Bill's former associates, O-Ren is one of the Bride's toughest fights.
    • Vol. 2: Karen Kim is an intimidating assassin who tries to kill the Bride just after she discovered she was pregnant. Karen disguises herself as a hospitality manager at the Bride's hotel to get her guard down, and nearly kills her with a surprise blast of her shotgun. Blocking a thrown dagger with the butt of her weapon, Karen reaches a standoff with her target, and learns that she is pregnant. Proving to have some humanity, Karen calls off the hit and leaves with a final congratulations.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • The Ironside theme became iconic enough to be often used as a surprise sting in various web series.
    • "X is as useful as an asshole on the elbow."
  • Moe: Being young children both B.B. and Nikki qualify. Especially in Nikki's case you'll feel awfully sorry for all the mess she has to withness. Not that it fazes her...
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • Pai Mei reacts to the slightest offense, real or imaginary, by plucking out the offender's eye. He also slaughtered an entire monastery because they begged forgiveness for one of their monks not acknowledging a nod that Pai Mei gave him, and because the monks didn't want to behead him in "apology" to Pai Mei. What a Jerkass.
      • What makes the massacre possibly worse is the context of the nod. Bill says there's a chance the only reason the Shaolin monk didn't return it was simply because the nod was so slight (it is Pai Mei after all) he never saw it in order to be able to return it, meaning 60 monks died because Pai Mei barely inclined his head.
    • The orderly Buck has made a lifestyle of raping comatose patients, and in a more enterprising example, pimps their bodies to various other lowlifes as well.
    • Elle Driver loses every amount of the audience's sympathy when it's revealed that she poisoned Pai Mei to death in retaliation for taking her eye. Even as much of a rotten bastard as Pai Mei was to both the Bride and Elle, he did not deserve to go out like that.
    • The Massacre at Two Pines, the horrific event perpetrated by the Deadly Vipers Assassination Squad that kicks off the events of the film. Bill and his crew slaughter an entire wedding chapel of innocent people, only missing the Bride and her unborn child by pure chance, and all because Bill "overreacted" at the idea that Bea/the Bride had gone into hiding after learning she was pregnant with his child, something he did not know (and assumed that the reason for her hiding was actually the dork she "married") until after the DiVAs did the massacre.
  • Narm Charm: Really just the whole first volume: notable scenes include O-Ren’s decapitation of a yakuza boss, which is promptly followed by High-Pressure Blood, and O-Ren's death, where the Bride chops off the top of her skull, leaving her brain exposed and unharmed. Some of the dialogue is just so cheesy, over-the-top anime, but this is Quentin we're talking about, so it still comes off as badass either way.
  • Older Than They Think:
  • One-Scene Wonder:
    • Samuel L. Jackson as Rufus, the pianist. He quite literally only appears in one scene before he is killed off screen along with everyone else in attendance for the wedding rehearsal.
    • Michael Parks as Esteban Vihaio, the retired leader of the Acuna Boys gang.
  • Paranoia Fuel: Comatose patients being raped.
  • Squick:
    • Elle's eye being smashed under the Bride's foot.
    • How did Buck pay for the Pussy Wagon? People paying for a little "alone time" with comatose patients, of course.
    • The dirty jar of vaseline Buck gives his trucker friend.
    • The first two murders after the Bride wakes up are also pretty squick-worthy. First, she chews the bottom lip off her assailant, then slashes Buck's Achilles tendon in a painful closeup.
    • Boss Matsumoto's teeth popping out from gritting them too hard when O-Ren stabs him in the flashback.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Vernita Green has the least screen-time, lacks characterization compared to the other DiVAS, and is killed off early into the film (despite actually being the second DiVAS to go down).
    • Sofie Fatale disappears after Part I despite being very much alive and having justified reason to continue opposing the Bride.

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