Kill Bill has been called a film junkie's soup of cinematic references, but martial arts revenge story will do. Or even better Crouching Tiger meets Charlie's Angels darkside up. The appearance of Charlie's Angel Lucy Liu as head of a powerful cartel of Japanese yakuza, adds to that sense that you are watching bad "angels". Also, instead of Charlie as the mysterious boss figure, you have Bill (David Carradine), the head of a female group of assassins. Like Charlie you never fully see Bill.

The first instalment of this two-film story is an excuse for wall-to-wall bloodletting. Uma Thurman, described only as "The Bride", embarks on a blood-thirsty revenge spree after Bill and hitwomen from The Deadly Viper Squad (Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu, Vivica A Fox) leave The Bride and wedding guests for dead. When she awakes out of a coma several years later, there's one thing on her mind (apart from the metal plate where the bullet entered her head): revenge.

If Tarantino ever listened to the criticism about how violent and bloody his films were in the past, then this is one big "fuck you". The violence is off-the-scale. It could be argued he's already laid the grounds for his defence by making the violence so cartoonish, with limbless characters gushing blood all over the place that it wouldn't be amiss in a Monty Python sketch.

The unrelenting mutilation of bodies and geysers of blood is grotesquely funny, but the bad-ass humour is also shot with Tarantino's retro style. The soundtrack is, of course, classic Tarantino, with plenty of surf guitar riffs and heavy use of tremolo and reverb from the beehive era.

The small touches matter as well, whether it be an array of shades on top of a cop car dashboard or the red-cross eyepatch Daryl Hannah's character dons when disguising herself as a nurse for a hit.

Being Quentin means having a licence to use split screens, slomo, star trek jokes and a violent manga-style anime which fills in the background story for one of the characters. The sets are noticeably minimal, the action consuming.

Tarantino even borrows Matrix Reloaded choreographer Yuen Woo-ping to riff on the scene where Neo hammers it out with all those Mr Smiths in Matrix Reloaded. Here The Bride slices and dices a small army of besuited yakuza, leaving decapitated and delimbed bodies writhing in a lake of blood. The Bride barely draws sweat in the process.

Naturally, there's not a lot of room here for a girl to grow. The Bride character is little more than a one-dimensional "bad bitch" with a samurai sword. Her main reason for being there is to kick butt not to search her soul and she doesn't learn much in the course of the film, save that she enjoys dishing out revenge. Still Uma Thurman makes the most of the witty repartee as well as being physically up to the role of action heroine. Long after you've become inured to the bodycount, Uma's still got you hooked.