“Kill Bill: Volume One” is an empty, vacuous film that looks and sounds like the work of a filmmaking prodigy. That is about the only cogent thing one can say about a film whose title is also an exhaustive summary of plot and character. As a revenge epic, this film suffers greatly in comparison to Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River”, another tale of retribution released on the same day, which has sophistication, and not just style, to burn. The comparison, however, exposes a more fundamental difference. Tarantino’s movies resist criticism because they are nothing more than gleeful tours through his museum of a mind, spellbinding tours de force of postmodernist junk collecting.

Less like “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown”, and more like “Reservoir Dogs” and “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn”, the collage Tarantino assembles in “Kill Bill” is fascinating but solidly closed, almost esoteric. In spite of this it has, like all his films, an endearing warmth because of his wicked sense of humor. The laughs come when his pulpy, stylized world suddenly runs up against the banalities of ours: high genre style suddenly perforated by the drudgery of reality. In “Pulp Fiction” a hit-man complains about having his car keyed, in “Jackie Brown” a criminal doesn’t want the levels on his stereo touched, and in “Kill Bill” a vicious assassin pauses in a knife-fight because her daughter comes home from school. The laws of Tarantino’s universe seldom resemble ours, but when they do, the contrast is pure (and often unexpected) delight.

His idiot-savant directorial style is also helped by his flawless casting, and “Kill Bill” is no exception. Uma Thurman’s Bride is one tough cookie, murderously single-minded but agreeably rational (as she herself points out), backlit by hints of vulnerability and sorrow that keep her grounded. Not to be confused with the one-dimensional killers of this genre, Thurman made sure The Bride included some bubbly blonde (her meeting with Hattori Hanzo) and stern mother (she spanks one of the Crazy 88 recruits and tells him to run home). It’s her long face and sad eyes that stick in the memory, though, Tarantino seizing every opportunity for a gripping close-up shot. As thin as the story is, to her credit Thurman created a remarkably full character.

Lucy Liu’s placid O-Ren Ishii seems not a million miles from her character in “Charlie’s Angels”, although she is both softer and more deadly, a point made when she tip-toes in her dainty white slippers across a table to behead a disgruntled crime boss. Her beautiful face radiates dignity, which is why it’s so hilarious to see her expression remain unmoved even as she watches the neck of the now-headless crime boss turn into a lawn sprinkler of blood. Supporting characters are all memorable, especially Sonny Chiba’s retired sword maker and Chiaki Kuriyama’s Go-Go Yubari, who steals a few scenes as a schoolgirl psychotic. Go-Go would fit in perfectly as a Bond villain’s henchwoman, if the Bond franchise were even half as cool as Tarantino’s feeblest out-takes.

The soundtrack is perhaps the movie’s best dimension.  As usual Tarantino has mined his personal archives for an idiosyncratic collection of pop songs, while The RZA, who did the film’s original score, came up with se electrifying fusions of pop, rap, soul, rock, Spaghetti Western themes, traditional Japanese music, and probably a dozen other styles that no one but a studious archivist at the Library of Congress could recognize. Every scene has a tempo and an atmosphere created by a wildly variegated ensemble of material.  A Bernard Herrmann theme is used to choreograph early suspense.  The plaintive harmonica song in the anime interlude is as haunting as anything in “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. O-Ren’s theme, an upbeat, percussive shuffle that comes in a few delicious flavors, is particularly good, and Santa Esmerelda’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” was an unforgettable choice to use for the petite Yakuza boss’s final confrontation with The Bride. It’s a testament to the quality of the soundtrack to remark that, without the extraordinary music, “Kill Bill” would be almost totally devoid of humanity. Only Wes Anderson uses pop music as well.

Tarantino uses silence just as deftly, though. The fight scenes start and end with music, but the middle is quiet—all breathing, footsteps, and the swish of fabric as the killers make their lethal lunges. Tarantino has a good ear for the deadly concentration involved in advanced fighting styles, but he hasn’t forgotten the slashes and crashes. He clearly went out of his way for realism, adding a crunchy, nasty feel to the wounds inflicted. When Vernita is tossed through a glass table with a resounding smash and thud, the pain is clearly communicated. Not drowned by the soundtrack, screams and moans fill the House of Blue Leaves as halved and quartered men lay writhing in agony. And when O-Ren cuts The Bride’s back in their fight, Esmerelda’s chugging beat suddenly stops as if to say “the fun is over, now it’s on”. Wounding and killing are serious business for Tarantino, and while the violence is cartoonish, there’s an unusual vividness to it that recalls (oddly enough) the terrifying realism of “Saving Private Ryan”.

The film cannot be watched as a consecutive narrative. Instead Tarantino has created five vignettes which are told out of order in a way resembling “Pulp Fiction”. This was a mistake. The film needs one of those razor-edged samurai swords in the editing room, for “Kill Bill” should not have been released as a two-volume set. Chapter Five, “Showdown At House Of Blue Leaves”, gets weighed down with unearned significance because, thanks to the bisection of the two films, it happens to be “Volume One”’s climactic scene. The sheer length of the battle—20 minutes is my conservative guess—blows the movie’s proportions and destroys the momentum Tarantino built in the earlier scenes.

More upsettingly, the scene is all spectacle, no story. The House of Blue Leaves quickly becomes a slaughterhouse, and Tarantino, despite his meticulous appropriation of “cool” influences, adds another, probably unintended influence to the list: “Monty Python’s Holy Grail”, namely the Black Knight in the forest. The final scene plays out like the Pythons’ disgustingly bloody bit, with The Bride in the role of King Arthur and every one of O-Ren’s crew as so many floundering Black Knights. Arms and legs are severed, sending blood spurting in gouts. Blades flash, heads fly, and, preposterously, Tarantino even uses what looks like water balloons in the black and white “rage” sequence to jack up the gruesome wetness of the blood-sprays. One unfortunate Crazy 88er is chopped cleanly in two, as if he were made of marzipan. How this film avoided an NC-17 is beyond understanding.

To what end this gorgeous carnage? A beautiful set-piece in a tranquil Japanese garden, beneath a snowy sky, O-Ren and The Bride squaring off as if contained in a crystal snow-globe. Dandy, but why the endless stream of hacking brutality to get there? Editing would have brought the scene to its proper size, putting the sword duel immediately after Go-Go’s demise, but instead Tarantino chose to show The Bride dicing about thirty or forty other men first. So uneven a ratio of mindless killing to story development only highlights what was probably true anyway—the killing is nothing more than witless self-indulgence. The fact that Miramax elected to break up the film into two parts simply demonstrates that no one can refuse the bullying power of Tarantino’s film-geek enthusiasm, least of all the director himself. This isn’t even excusable as grandiose ambition like that of the “Apocalypse Now” variety. Coppola at least had many layers of story he wanted to get at, even if some of them were half-baked. Tarantino’s largesse is sheer folly. It would be like Coppola shooting twenty minutes of a bloody back-and-forth between Willard’s boat and the natives who attack them with spears, just to show spearheads busting through chests and bullets ripping through skulls.

That said, the chronologically broken storyline of “Kill Bill” could mean that “Volume Two” will retroactively change much of “Volume One”. Perhaps the fight with O-Ren will take on more significance after some piece of back-story is revealed; after all, why is O-Ren first on the list? Since the slaying of Vernita Green takes up so little of the film, perhaps there is more to that story than meets the eye as well. None of this excuses the ludicrous decision made by Miramax to break up the film. “Kill Bill” needs to be watched straight through. A wafer-thin revenge story cannot be teased out over two films and three or four months. The House of Blue Leaves sequence is a stark lesson in how not to structure a story, leaving the film as crippled as one of the Crazy 88ers. It’s much too early to call, but “Kill Bill” could go down as a great catastrophe. Is that a harsh judgment for what is, at heart, a midnight movie? Sure, but Tarantino’s blazing talent demands that his work be held to higher standards than those upheld by the B movie cultists he often seeks to impress to the exclusion of everyone else. We need him more than they do.