Starring: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen (I), Lucy Liu

You thought you had problems with The Matrix Reloaded? Just wait until you sit through the ultra-talented Quentin Tarantino's ultra-violent wet dream, Kill Bill: Vol. 1. It's like going to a Yo-Yo Ma concert, only to discover that he's playing 41 different variations on the old Batman television theme.

Actually, so revealing is Bill into the mind and pleasure zones of this once great, and future great director, that you feel like he's sitting next to you, moaning and gasping and touching himself. Yeah, at points, it's that icky.

Remember that cringe, that shudder that went through you upon hearing what Tarantino was up to as his first project after his five-year hiatus? It sounded like Quentin unfettered, a genius-baby given his chance to make whatever he wanted, and what he wanted to make was a film geek's dream; a chop-socky, Jack Hill-esque epic based upon the revenge-themed world of the spaghetti westerns. And Tarantino is so versed in the lore and touchstones of these films, and has proven his ability to be at the vanguard of what the public is ready to take, it seemed plausible that he, only he, could pull it off.

In one very real sense, he does. If you have long loved Jack Hill movies, chop-socky and Hong Kong epics and the plethora of spaghetti western films (not just those by Sergio Leone), THIS is your film. Tarantino has made a film that any dyed-in-the-wool, arranges-their-DVD-collection-by-director film geek will love. He made a movie that he wanted to see. It's a Christmas gift that he made in his workshop, shellacked, wrapped with his prettiest wrapping, adorned with his prettiest bow, created a hand-made card for (addressing it to himself), and then acted surprised when he found it underneath his tree.

Most, however, will find themselves watching Tarantino tear into his present with glee, describing how he made it, how long it took him to make it and detailing what each obscure reference means, and wondering, "Um…did you get me anything?"

It's certainly not the plot, which sounds like the cable version of the failed TV pilot, "Fox Force Five," that Uma Thurman's character, Mia Wallace, described in Pulp Fiction. In Kill Bill, however, Tarantino gives us the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (yes, the acronym is DiVAS, there's a lot of that in this movie). The Squad consists of Black Mamba (aka, the Bride, played by Uma Thurman), Cottonmouth (aka O-ren Ishi, played by Lucy Liu), California Mountain Snake (aka Elle Driver, played by Daryl Hannah), Copperhead (aka Vernita Green, played by Vivica Fox and Sidewinder (aka Budd, played by Michael Madsen). They're all lead by Bill (David Carradine) and, for reasons yet unknown, they turn on the Bride, put a bullet in her head (after a vicious beating) and kill her entire wedding party (including, we assume, the groom). The Bride survives and wakes up four years later with one thing on her mind: revenge.

One thing Tarantino did remember was to make the film look amazing. Cinematographer Robert Richardson brings Tarantino's often gorgeous, often ludicrous visions to light and life. Their black-and-white in the opening sequence is positively feral, the warm, rich tones in a Japanese teahouse are just as vital. There is a sitcom blandness to the opening catfight scene and an undeniable Kurosawa majesty to the Vol. 1 end duel. A moment of the swift feet of O-Ren across the top of a conference room table is magical and terrifying; would there was more of it.

An odd choice, and perhaps it's a matter of how the film had to be presented once it was broken in two (and dear God help us, there will be revivals where this thing is sewn back together, "as it should be seen"), is that we know the results of the climactic samurai battle in the fourth segment, "The Showdown at the House of the Blue Leaves," before it happens. This is a particularly poor choice because the odds become so overwhelming (prepare yourself for a Reloaded "Burly Man" deja-vu ) that knowing what happens (and sure, we already know, know what's going to happen) just undercuts our appreciation of what is about to happen. Frankly, it makes it a bit boring.

It's the anime sequence, which is gorgeous, probably one of the best yet made (by Production I.G., the same production house that created the lugubrious, overrated Ghost in the Shell), that tells the most about this film. In the sequence we find out the origin of Liu's character, O-Ren Ishii. O-Ren is the coldest killer in Japan and has risen in the ranks of the yakuza, the Mafia there. But how did she get that way? We see, in an animated sequence that faithfully recreates a hand-held camera style, O-Ren's parents murdered before her eyes by a powerful crime boss. In fact, as she hides beneath the bed, she's baptized in the blood that streams from above; the source is her own mother. A few years later O-Ren dispatches the crime boss responsible. She's been granted close access to him because he's a pedophile and she's straddling him when she plunges a sword through his chest.

Why did Tarantino choose anime for this sequence? Because you can't film an eight-year old girl experiencing the death of both her parents, or, later, that same girl, now twelve, straddling a 60-year-old pedophile, shortly before she kills him, bathing herself once again in blood. But you can show it in anime. And you can expect the audience, or at least the film geek audience, to accept it in anime, deep in the lizard part of their media-consuming brain; it's just anime. That kind of stuff happens a lot in anime. Tarantino knows it and exploits it. It's actually a surprise that phallic-tentacles, in the best anime tradition, don't then burst from the crime boss and impale themselves in O-Ren's orifices.

Tarantino, who with this film is a better critic than director, uses his chosen genres for all they're worth and claims he's paying homage to them. But in the most fundamental sense he's sapping them, draining them of every reasonable motif and cue and moment to make his point, to make a whole. But, so far, these parts do not make a whole. In some ways, this film is more a Master's thesis than it is a movie.

The performances, particularly from Uma Thurman, who goes from naïve tourist to bereaved mother to hardened killer, are uniformly good. Lucy Liu manages to make a sort-of-human out of the crime-overlord assassin O-Ren and Sonny Chiba makes his presence felt in his role as the master swordsman whom the Bride pulls out of retirement.

It's a hope that with Kill Bill Vol. 1 (and Kill Bill Vol. II, which seems to promise some of the mournful, fate-driven tones of spaghetti westerns), that Tarantino has his Hook out of his system. He won't need to make another from Tarantino's "Movie World," as he calls it, comparing it to the "Quentin Universe," where Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs came from. It's perhaps most telling that "Movie World" seems just that, confined to one specific location whereas the "Quentin Universe" holds the limitless possibilities and expanses once glimpsed. The latter is preferable.