'Kill Bill' suffers from sever-al problems

GIVEN THAT "Kill Bill: Vol. I" hacks off more limbs than Hurricane Isabel, it's appropriate that the movie itself has been severed.

The movie was originally envisioned as a nonstop amputatathon that clocked in at better than three hours. Evidently a sickening three hours. So, Quentin Tarantino and Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein decided simple to cut it in half - releasing half today, half in February.

This move prompted a certain amount of suspicion: People naturally want to know how you can simply take a movie, split it down the middle, and expect each half to be a satisfying whole.

The answer is that you probably can't. But "Kill Bill" isn't really a movie. Or at least it's less a movie than a video game, in which the viewer follows an anonymous central figure through an escalating series of challenges, in this case ultraviolent martial arts challenges. You could stop it at any time and start again later.

The anonymous central figure in "Kill Bill" is an assassin code-named Black Mamba (Uma Thurman), and we quickly learn that she was gunned down and left for dead on the day of her wedding. And that she was pregnant. And that she was gunned down by colleagues - fellow assassins in the employ of a dude named Bill (unseen, the voice of David Carradine).

Now she's out to kill them all - the retired (Vivica A. Fox) who lives in the suburbs, the kung fu legend O-Ren Ishi (Lucy Liu), who now runs the Japanese mafia in Tokyo, and eventually, we presume, Bill himself.

But first the matter of her paralysis. The wedding day attack leaves her in a coma, and she awakens in a hospital where an orderly plans to do horrible things to her. She must fight her way out, using only her arms and her teeth.

That accounts for most of Volume One: three set-pieces, one in the hospital, one in a suburban home, the third in a Japanese restaurant wherein Black Mamba kills more Japanese than Fat Man and Little Boy combined. In vid-game fashion, Mamba fights through each of them, and I guess we get the next level in "Volume II."

Tarantino, as is his habit, skips merrily back and forth between episodes, forward and backward in time, encouraging the audience to piece the jumble together as they enjoy the carnage, and there is certainly a lot of it.

This is the severed head and limb movie of all time, most of it played for laughs - when an arm is lopped off, blood hoses out. It's like watching the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" lose his arms and legs.

All very amusing, but two questions arise.

One: It took Tarantino six years to come up with this?

Two: Why do we give a crap about Black Mamba?

I guess because she's wearing a retro jogging suit, and she's Uma Thurman, although I admit I don't share Tarantino's fixation with her. She's a decent enough actress, but in a movie like this one - Hong Kong action archetypes and samurai film homage - an iconic presence is required. I'm not sure Thurman's work in "Chelsea Walls" qualifies her.

Also, in a three-way involving Fox, Liu and Thurman, Uma is the one I'd least like to see emerge victorious.

In fact, Liu's O-Ren Ishi is easily the movie's most interesting character, no doubt because Tarantino deigns to shows us where she came from, by means of a lengthy piece of Japanese animation.

She's the movie's most (only?) interesting character, and Tarantino outsmarts himself with his narrative time-tripping: Early in the game, he shows us Black Mamba's hit list with O-Ren Ishi's name already crossed off, thereby tipping us to the ending of their climactic, 20-minute battle.

Of course, it's only a climactic battle because Tarantino chopped the movie in half, and it's hard to quarrel with that decision. With the movie at 110 minutes, its tongue-in-cheek violence is tolerable. We can save the remaining severed heads for next year. *

C

KILL BILL VOL. I

Parents' guide: R; violence, gore

Running time: 110 minutes

Showing at: tkkkkkkkkkkkkkktkkt

Mamba: Uma Thurman

O-Ren Ishi: Lucy Liu

Vernita: Vivica A. Fox

Hattori: Sonny Chiba

xx

Produced by Lawrence Bender, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, music by RZA, distributed by Miramax.