Who would've ever guessed that Quentin Tarantino, director of “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction,” two of the hippest, sharpest movies of the past decade, would ever be so five minutes ago. Make that, so five years ago. The great disappointment of “Kill Bill — Vol. 1” isn't that the movie is little more than a virtuoso display of cinematic cleverness that adds up to zero. Or that you don't give a rat's butt about anyone in it. Or even that the cartoonish violence strives too desperately to up the ante on hipness. No, the great disappointment of “Kill Bill” is that so much of it is so unsurprising. In the wake of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” the “Matrix” series, even the recent “So Close,” Tarantino's movie comes off as been there, kicked that. “Vol. 1” is the first half of what originally was a single three-hour-plus film. However, his studio, Miramax, decided, with Tarantino on board, to stretch it into two movies. “Kill Bill — Vol. 2” comes out in February, inevitably followed by the all-you-can-eat “Kill Bill” DVD. Uma Thurman, who's terrific despite her one-note role, plays a character known as, variously, the Bride or Black Mamba. Once a member of the Deadly Viper Assassin Squad — which answers to a decidedly un-Charlie-esque unseen mentor named Bill (David Carradine) — she was left for dead when her former colleagues interrupted her wedding and killed everybody in sight. Four years later, she miraculously wakes from a coma and swears revenge on her attackers, including Bill. First, there's Vernita, code name Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox), now a responsible single mom. It is a kick to see these two gorgeous women go after each other with frying pans and butcher's knives. However, the scene's queasy resolution is less so and the first hint that Tarantino is off his game. Then there's a trip to Japan to deal with O-Ren Ishii, aka Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu), now the undisputed leader of Tokyo's gangs. En route, the Bride stops by Okinawa to have her Excalibur, so to speak, forged by a seemingly harmless sushi chef who turns out to be the last of the great samurai swordsmiths. The master is adroitly played by the excellent Sonny Chiba, a legendary figure in martial arts films. Of course, to know that, it helps to be a Tarantino groupie. Which brings up another problem with the movie: It's preeningly insider-ish. If you don't like the picture, the inference is, it's probably because you don't get all the references. The director's legions of ain't-it-cool acolytes are always up for carnage, and “Kill Bill” doesn't disappoint. Blood doesn't just spurt, it gushes like a volcano, pours like rain, spews like vomit. It's part of the joke and, yeah, its sheer grandiosity is pretty funny. Only the joke was even funnier when Monty Python did it in 1975 in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” For all his pretensions, Tarantino remains a brilliant moviemaker. A spectacular animé sequence pumps, well, fresh blood into the movie's tired first part. And the humongous fight in a Tokyo restaurant, pitting the Bride against a zillion Agent Smiths, um, I mean, guys in identical dark suits, is a masterpiece of choreographed chop-sockey action. Thurman's standoff with a deadly schoolgirl (marvelous Chiaki Kuriyama) has sensational flair, as does a final showdown with Liu in a snow-globe Japanese garden where the whiteness makes a perfect background for scarlet drops of blood. There is a terrible beauty in “Kill Bill”; it can't be totally dismissed as self-indulgence. However, Tarantino has spent too much time around his fans and the fawning media — they've become the equivalent of the old-style movie moguls' yes men. In a recent Newsweek interview, he says of “Kill Bill — Vol. 1,” “What I've delivered is good enough for now,” suggesting that the second movie will solve all. But ask yourself, do you really want to see something the filmmaker himself describes as “good enough for now”?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE