WHO but enfant terrible Quentin Tarantin could get away with this?

Ill disciplined film-making had left his Kill Bill movie massively over proposed length and $13 million over budget. No problem, says Miramax overlord Harvey Weinstein, split the Bill, have two movies, such is his gratitude that Tarantino has delivered any film at all after the long lull since 1997's more mature Jackie Brown.

"The 4th Film By Quentin Tarantino" - Tarantino always makes his films seem more like a cultural zeitgeist moment - is the technically dazzling, undeniably self-indulgent yet still cool and compelling work of a former video store clerk allowing himself to show off his knowledge of Chinese martial art films, Japanese Samurai films and Sergio Leone westerns.

Aside from the action-movie pyrotechnics, and typically sharp, retro yet hip score, and the audacious decision to switch the dialogue to Japanese with subtitles midway through, what makes Kill Bill a Tarantino work is that the driving force is female, as was the case in Jackie Brown.

Uma Thurman is The Bride, known in her assassin days as Black Mamba, when she was left for dead by masochistic crime lord Bill (David Carradine) in a wedding-day massacre. Five years later, she awakes from her coma, vowing revenge in an odyssey of samurai swordplay that will reduce the House Of Blue Leaves restaurant to a slaughterhouse in the climactic battle with the Crazy 88 assassination squad.

Thurman's lithe, super-fly Bride is a 'damaged heroine' in the manner of a Greek or Jacobean revenge tragedy: you know blood will be spilled; it is just a question of when, how often and how. The why will follow in Volume Two.

Ever the unconventional, Tarantino has done things in reverse in the art of the two-part film, leaving the character development, the verbal jousting, the back story and indeed all but the knuckles of the titular Bill for the second instalment, while stacking up the chop-socky action, severed limbs, flying heads and blood-spurting necks in the first.

For now, there is the kitsch comic-book movie from the boy in Tarantino. Volume Two will reveal whether the 40-year-old man has grown up.

Updated: 08:53 Friday, October 17, 2003