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NOT MANY filmmakers can claim to have their very own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, but Tarantinoesque [adj] is in there for good reason. No director has seen their style aped and plagiarised the way Quentin Tarantino did after he burst onto the scene in the early 90s. Before Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, screen criminals tended to be distant and otherwordly, and their work had to be treated with moral seriousness. But Tarantino reinvented the movie criminal into someone just like you, only a lot cooler: a motormouthed pop-culture nerd fixated on the Seinfeldian mundanities of everyday life. And the killing and brutalising they got up to was not presented as weighty or consequential, but filmed with a sense of scuzzy glamour and ironic indifference.

It wasn’t long until rental shelves everywhere were lined with endless pale imitations: mid-budget crime capers that fused profane bickering with explosive ultraviolence. Tarantino changed movies, and he even came with his own irresistible origin story: the geeky video-store clerk made good.

These days, Tarantino stands tall as one of the tiny handful of Hollywood directors still entrusted with decent money to make an original film. But the films themselves have taken the concept of Tarantinoesque to new extremes: whereas the early movies simply came with a postmodern bent and some insider references, the new ones are open homages to their director’s niche obsessions: samurai movies, Sergio Leone, Sharon Tate. The dialogue that was once effortlessly quickfire is now pointedly drawn out, desperate to call attention to its own cleverness. The everyday crooks have become cowboys, Nazis and slave masters, cartoonish caricatures performed with maximum self-awareness.

The dividing line between the two ages is clear as day. Kill Bill, 20 years old this month, marked the point when pared-back plotting turned into protracted pastiche. If the early films were mostly built with plausible characters and credible scenarios, the latterday stuff—with the partial exception of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood—takes place inside a self-referential shlockworld that bears little resemblance to reality. Kill Bill, with its jamboree of bloodshed and endless cinephile citations, set the template for Phase-Two Tarantino.

Even its production process wreaked of indulgence. Apparently unable to cut his film into a workable runtime, Tarantino was instead given licence to make a two-movie extravaganza, released six months apart. The result was a bloated four-hour tribute to grindhouse B-movies, kung-fu flicks, spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation and Bruce Lee. It featured three timelines, countless cult-hero cameos and one extended anime sequence. It should have been terrible. It was an indisputable masterpiece.

Kill Bill remains an astonishing achievement not just in terms of its blue-sky ambition and epic scale, but because it’s the only time Tarantino was able to enjoy the best of both worlds, indulging all his own obscure movie-geek infatuations while also delivering a crowdpleaser for the ages. Part of the film’s genius is in how it makes mockery of various apparent contradictions: it’s an adolescent-boy fantasy about female revenge; a winking meta-movie with real emotional stakes; a dazzlingly original collection of references and tributes.

It is also “a movie that symbolises female empowerment”—in the words of Uma Thurman—that was produced by Harvey Weinstein. The film features more than one scene of a woman violently killing a predatory man. Fifteen years later Thurman would emerge as one of Weinstein’s accusers.

Toni Anne Barson Archive | Getty Images

But if Thurman’s contribution to the MeToo movement helped pave the way for a new era behind the scenes, her performance here broke ground for her peers in front of the camera, too. Kill Bill wasn’t unprecedented in offering up a kick-ass heroine (Charlie’s Angels, Buffy, Alias and even the Powerpuff Girls were all earlier contemporaries) but it did demonstrate that the heroine in question didn’t need to be squeaky-clean or affably sexy. That she could perpetrate proper, pitiless violence. A good handful of modern action gems – including HaywireSalt and everything from the last decade of Charlize Theron’s career – owe their existence to Thurman’s bloodthirsty Bride.

But while it blazed something of a trail, Kill Bill also now stands as a relic of a bygone age in Hollywood history, when directors still ruled the roost and a “franchise” was where you bought your fast food. Despite its huge hype and critical acclaim, Kill Bill Vol.1 finished the year as only the 38th highest grossing film at the domestic box office. Seven of the top 10 were sequels. One of them was a superhero movie. For original big-budget filmmaking, the future was fast approaching. Or as the Bride put it: “Bitch, you don’t have a future.”


This article originally appeared on Esquire UK.

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