The central fact of any film by Quentin Tarantino is that it’s the work of an amateur. That’s not a knock, simply a fact. Although the word "amateur" itself has fallen into disrepute in a society which overvalues professionalism, it’s derived from the Latin word for love and, at its highest level, refers to a person who undertakes an endeavor passionately, if not vocationally.

     A particularly gifted amateur, Tarantino does make things difficult for himself by marring some of his work with the scars of movie buffdom. A movie buff is the nightmare version of a movie lover, a collector of names, titles and trivia who lacks critical discrimination and, for example, engages in conversation largely to ambush others with a display of superior knowledge of that trivia. As buffs sometimes will do, Tarantino gets a little sly about his sources. For example, there was no reason for him to pretend that Reservoir Dogs (1992) wasn’t based on Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (1987). His film was enough of his own work – a grossly overrated one, to be sure, though OK – to stand on its own. But he outsmarted himself, the obvious similarities opening him to unjust charges of copy-catism made, ironically, largely by buffs.

     Kill Bill Vol. 1 is the last – one can only hope – word in buff cinema. Overtly a tribute to the martial arts movies made by the Hong Kong Shaw Bros. studios during the 1970s (the studio operated in various forms from the 1930s until, I believe, the ’80s, though its years of dominance were the mid ’60s to the late ’70s), Tarantino goes so far as to open the film with the Shaw Bros. fanfare and the well-known "Shaw-Scope" widescreen logo.

     Tarantino makes references to Japanese martial arts films, too, largely by casting Japanese star Sonny Chiba in the role of a retired samurai sword-maker. Chiba’s character makes a special blade for the film’s heroine, "The Bride" (Uma Thurman), who also goes by the name Black Mamba, so that she might avenge herself on the band of martial arts assassins (her former colleagues) who mistakenly thought they had killed her.

     Chiba, who is something of an obsession with Tarantino, came to fame in the 1970s as the star of both Japanese-made straight martial arts and ninja (black masks, etc.) films. The problem is that while Chiba was a decent, if eccentric screen presence, his movies are terrible. The only one worth watching at all is 1974’s Street Fighter, and that’s because of its wildly over-the-top bloodletting. And even at that, the complete, ultra-violent version has only been available in the U.S. on DVD in recent years, so it’s likely that Tarantino’s obsession predated his exposure to the real deal. This is an example of his unthinking, undiscriminating buffdom.

     Kill Bill V. 1 also provides yet another example of Tarantino’s slyness about his sources. In a small role, the director cast Gordon Liu, a former Shaw Bros. star who appeared in one of the studio’s biggest moneymakers, 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Tarantino cites the film in Kill Bill’s notes, and also mentions the movie’s director, Liu Chialiang, the actor’s brother. But Liu the director started out as the action choreographer for an even larger figure in the Hong Kong Pantheon, the man most responsible for the Shaw studio’s preeminence in action cinema, Chang Cheh.

     Kill Bill’s biggest action set piece occurs in a Tokyo restaurant when The Bride takes on a seemingly endless torrent of Yakuza fighters, killing, or permanently disabling every single one of them. The sequence is pretty much a straight cop from Chang Cheh’s 1972 kung fu masterpiece, The Boxer from Shantung, right down to the use of hatchets.

     Tarantino isn’t totally underhanded about his debt to Chang Cheh. He names his group of assassins the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, a more or less open tribute to a late and relatively inferior Chang Cheh series that began with The Five Deadly Vipers. But this is almost a bit of misdirection, a way of acknowledging the filmmaker as one of many influences when, in fact, the late Hong Kong director’s work forms the template for nearly all of Tarantino’s movie.

     So there are the Hong Kong references, open and covert; the Sonny Chiba stuff; and also a long anime sequence. All testimony to Tarantino’s familiarity with East Asian cinema.

     But that’s all it is. Kill Bill V. 1 is a distressingly sloppy and boring movie that has nothing to establish beyond its makers buff bona fides. Some commentators complain about or praise Tarantino’s supposed preoccupation with violence or nihilism as the animating motive of this latest opus, but there’s nothing either fiery or cold enough in the movie to support either argument. The blood may run red, but this is a pallid film.

     The first clue that nothing is going on is the atrocious editing. It’s bad enough that the fight scenes are cut together with enough slack to hang a moose. The main problem comes in the larger assemblage of sequences into the finished film. There’s no drive, no discernable rhythm, except maybe the hiccupping stop, start and stall reminiscent of a teenager driving his first standard shift automobile.

     The action covers a four and a half year span and is – too cute – divided into chapters, which Tarantino covers with flashbacks, but the whole structure is completely meaningless. If the film were chronologically linear, it wouldn’t affect the dynamic in anyway. Well, there’s no dynamic to affect, but you get the picture. And as far as the narrative goes, it’s so scant, and so lacking in any purpose, that the script could have been sliced by one of Chiba’s samurai swords, reassembled by a blind man, and shot in the new order without rendering the finished film materially changed.

     For the record, the linear description would read: The Bride, or Black Mamba is, for some reason, murdered (along with her husband, the minister, witnesses, and, so she thinks, the fetus inside her) by her fellow assassins during her wedding in a lonesome West Texas chapel. But wait, despite a bullet in the head (get it?) and years in a coma, she survives and begins to seek her revenge.

The two attempts we get to see are the two she takes on Vernita Green, aka "Copperhead," which is actually the movie’s first sequence. By far the best scene in the movie, though not first rate for a martial arts sequence, it’s also funny and promises far more than the movie will deliver.

     From there on, Kill Bill V. 1 sinks like a piece of jade in a temple fountain. After stopping off in Okinawa to get her sword from Sonny Chiba, The Bride heads to Tokyo where another member of the squad, O-Ren Ishii, aka Cottonmouth (the indescribably untalented Lucy Liu) , has set herself up as a Yakuza queen. Her chief aide is played by Chiaki Kuriyama, still wearing her schoolgirl uniform from Battle Royale and who, as far as I can tell, is in the film solely to prove that Tarantino has, in fact, seen Battle Royale.

     Tarantino trips all over himself introducing multiple characters in the Tokyo section, adding to the general two-dimensionality of the characterizations. If he’s trying to make the characters two dimensional and emotionless on purpose, he’s certainly violating the standards of Shaw Bros. films, whose heroes and villains were seething with eroticism, anger, jealousy, hate, and love. Given the cast, it’s remarkable how Kill Bill utterly lacks even a hint of sexuality.

     As if matters weren’t mired enough, it’s here that the director inserts his anime sequence, a yawner despite the blood flow, a statement that could expand to cover the entire misbegotten enterprise.

     What a shame Tarantino finds himself engaging in such, ahem, eccentric behavior right on the heels of his most mature work to date, Jackie Brown. For the first time in that film, he had produced characters capable of sustaining and projecting passion within a context of action – action that was better for being more structured.

     Let the buffs have at this one.