Hellooooooo nurse.
Her nerves are twisted.
4) The Bride vs Elle Driver
The Fighters:
- The Bride, blah blah. She’s just been through some pretty nasty stuff, but, as always, is ready to throw down. Played by Uma Thurman, who possibly does her best work here. Well, second-best, after the reunion at the end.
- Armed with: Nothing, actually. She doesn’t even have shoes. But she finds some handy implements soon enough.
- Elle Driver aka California Mountain Snake, a one-eyed former member of the DiVAS. She & Beatrix clearly never got along, partially because they were rivals for Bill’s affection. In the script there’s some business where they realize that they’re a lot alike and they never had to hate each other, so they find some peaceful respect before their duel (which is more traditional); in the film, although she talks a little about the professional “respect” she has for the Bride, her actions & attitude imply that talk is all it was. This Elle is 100% Bitch. Played by Daryl Hannah, who savors every last hammy line like it’s a bite of Christmas dinner.
- Armed with: The Bride’s Hattori Hanzo sword, “purchased” from Budd. But she never really gets to use it.
[The pair’s names also make for a fun bit of synchronicity: “Elle” and “Bea” (short for Beatrix) are homophones for the simple letters “L” and “B.” Before the end of the fight the two address each other as such, indicating a clear familiarity. A nice touch.]
The Setup: After settling Vernita’s hash, the Bride set her sights on Budd, the only male member of the DiVAS and Bill’s brother. Despising himself for the murderous life he’d led, Budd was living a self-imposed punishment of poverty and alcoholism out in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. But he scraped together enough self-preservation to ambush the Bride, finally leaving her trapped in a coffin, buried alive.
Assuming she’d suffocate, Budd offered to sell her Hanzo sword to Elle for a million dollars. Elle took him up on it (after demanding that Budd make her “suffer to her last breath”) but, disgusted by how a great warrior like Beatrix was taken out by a scrub like Budd, she loaded the money bag with a real live Black Mamba snake, killing him painfully.
But unbeknownst to either of them, the Bride had, thanks to the cruel tutelage of her kung fu master Pai Mei, the ability to deliver effective punches three inches from her target. After an awesome flashback to said tutelage, the Bride smashed her way free of the coffin and out of the cold dirt, then headed straight back to her target. She arrives just as Elle opens the door, and greets her with a flying double kick.
Opening doors is very hazardous in the world of Kill Bill, kind of like Vince Vega going to the bathroom in Pulp Fiction.
The Fight: In a word: oof.
Yo ho.
If the fight with Vernita was mean, this one is brutal. Same principle– two powerful women face off fiercely in a domestic environment– but everything’s turned up to 11. Louder, crazier, nastier, harder. Never is it more apparent that these two hate, hate, HATE each other– maybe almost as much as Roger Ebert hated North, if such a thing were possible. Every blow and strike is sold with wincingly painful realism.
And despite being short it’s packed with variety. For most of the time, Elle is armed with the Bride’s katana, but due to either her opponent’s interference or the tight confines of the trailer, she’s never able to fully draw it and thus gain significant advantage. It happens enough times to be a running joke. Until the very end, the most it gets used is when it’s partially drawn and they take turns trying to push it into each other’s necks.
B uses a TV antenna as weapon and later hits L in the head with a lampshade. L stomps on B’s bare foot with high heel. B throws can of Budd’s tobacco spit (I believe) into L’s face, which makes her say “gross” in a way that makes her sound more like an annoyed teenager than a pissed off assassin. At one point they kick each other down at the same time and there is a split-screen camera showing them simultaneously recover.
The fight finally becomes fully hand-to-hand when the Bride disarms Elle with a foot stool. Driver runs up and tries a flying kick (she’s airborne for an absurdly long time) but the Bride sidesteps it, seizes her leg, and throws her through a wall into the bathroom. The bride then grabs her rival’s head and plunges it into Budd’s filthy toilet. Now THAT’S gross.
There’s gotta be a “Splash” joke in here somewhere….
Creatively, Elle hits the flusher in order to catch a few breathes, and escapes the Bride’s grip by elbowing her in the crotch. A few follow-up blows stun Beatrix long enough for Elle to run back to the living room and grab the dropped katana. Fortunately the Bride, glancing into a closet, sees Budd’s own Hanzo sword (an old gift from Bill that he’d lied about pawning). She grabs it and rises to meet Elle on the opposite end of the trailer’s hallway.
Although the soundtrack has been silent until now, as they stand off and talk an odd, tribal music kicks in. It’s got ominous drums, horn riffs and ritualistic chanting (it’s an old Ennio Morricone tune)– completely over the top, fittingly.
The Bride asks Elle (“just between us girls” she says with faux-sweetness) what it was she said to Pai Mei that caused him to rip her eye out. Elle says it was that she called him a “miserable old fool,” and we see a brief flashback to the incident. But just as the audience processes the information that Elle trained under the same ancient kung fu master as the Bride (and was an inferior student), we’re hit with another whammy: Elle reveals that she murdered Pai Mei in retaliation, by poisoning his food. The Bride is visibly incensed– and so is the audience, because it wasn’t that long ago we saw the full-length flashback chapter showing Beatrix’s bond with the irascible old man. Then, they exchange what may well be the greatest dialogue in the history of motion pictures:
ELLE: “That’s right: I killed your master. And now I’m gonna kill you too… with your own sword, no less. Which, in the very immediate future, will become MY sword.”
BRIDE: “Bitch, you don’t have a future.”
Did I say in the history of motion pictures? Sorry, I meant in the history of THE SPOKEN WORD.
Levelling swords, they face off for what feels like an eternity (it’s a solid 30 seconds, I counted), as the music builds and builds and builds. You’d swear this isn’t a stand-off between two human women but between two tyrannosaurs. When the tension reaches a boiling point they charge in and lock blades, each pushing furiously at the other. After several alternating close-ups of both women’s faces, the Bride does something unexpected: she rips Elle’s other eye out.
Elle, now completely blind, goes bat guano crazy. She kicks and screams and cusses and falls to the ground, lashing out at everything in (her lack of) sight. The Bride watches, aloof & disgusted. She calmly drops Elle’s eyeball onto the carpet and, in a gruesome closeup, squishes it beneath her bare feet. No, THAT’S gross.
The Bride collects her sword and leaves Elle writhing in pain and fury. It’s an open question of whether or not she lives (a literal question mark, in the case of the end credits), but the camera is careful to show us the Black Mamba snake still lurking in the trailer. The miserable old fool sends his regards.
So much greatness here. While I miss the added dimension the script gave to Elle, there’s actually more than enough melancholy & regret in this story to go around, so it was a wise decision to make the character into a pure villain and have the audience straightforwardly cheering for her defeat. A few of the moves in the fight border on the silly (Elle’s extended jump kick springs to mind) but for the most part the choreography is very grounded and painful. The animosity at play here is truly palpable and the violence is uncompromising. Kill Bill volume 2 is notoriously scrimpy on action, but this scene is almost enough to make up for that bang/buck ratio.
[Note: I won’t be including the final showdown with Bill, as it’s simply far too short to properly grade, awesome or no. As stated earlier, the entire climactic sequence with Bill and B.B. works on an entirely different, and unexpected, level. Similarly you’ll notice I didn’t cover the training “fight” against Pai Mei from his flashback chapter; it’s also fairly short, not to mention one-sided and deliberately cheesy. So long, Kill Bill.]
Grade: A
Recommended Links: I can’t stop watching it.
I kept referring to that script this whole series like it was some kind of hard-to-find relic. Turns out it’s all online. Read it and ponder what might have been.
Coming Attractions: Mine nostrils do perceive the good sir Johnson’s prepared cuisine.
Verily, a jabroni you be.
Grading Fight Scenes 