- I'm not standing in front of this person,
I'm gonna immediately start attacking,
attacking, attacking, attacking.
(dramatic music) (glass breaking)
- Welcome back to another episode
of Scenic Fights, "Fight Scene Breakdown."
I'm Chad Vázquez. - I'm Logan Lo.
And today, we're breaking down
the 2003, "Kill Bill: Volume 1,"
starring Uma Thurman as The Bride,
and Vivica A. Fox as Vernita Green.
- Let's not waste any time and get into it.
- All right, let's go.
(keyboard clicks) - [Chad] And delivery.
- [Logan] Oh, knuckle sandwich.
- [Chad] Boom. - Big haymakers by Uma.
- Okay, a very exaggerated redirection
by Vivica and axe kick by her too, okay
- Nice upkicks. - Upkick by Uma.
A lot is happening real fast.
- [Logan] Ooh, attack right to the knee, power backhand,
power double hand to the face.
- [Chad] Ooh, yeah, that landed hard.
- [Logan] Captain Kirk.
- Actually in judo and jiu-jitsu
there is a similar take down, a throw,
referred to as a tomoe nage,
obviously not exactly like that, but the idea.
- I like to call it a Captain Kirk.
- [Chad] Okay, so she's trying a rear naked strangle,
some issues we see, there's no legs involved
as we discussed before in the past.
- Is she punching the arm, Vivica is punching the arm?
- Yeah, not the best defense.
- [Logan] Okay, that looks like a terrible choke.
- Yeah, so, all right, let's pause here.
So, as discussed in past episodes,
we went over what is required
for a proper rear naked strangle, points I've made, legs.
Legs are very important,
and you can see clearly here, there are no legs,
which is why there's not a fast knockout done by Uma's part.
- How fast could it happen? - I've actually counted,
by like four to five seconds, for a quick (snaps) knockout.
- Now, why do you call it a strangle and not a choke?
- Strangle's referred to pressure within the carotids.
Chokes is a good term,
referring to pressure within the windpipe.
- Oh, so a choke is for air?
- Yeah. - Oh, gotcha.
- Ooh, weapon time? Weapon time, bam!
- Vivica responses back with, what's that called?
- A poker. - A poker, okay.
Yeah, well, she poked her with those.
- Goodness, Chad.
(keyboard clicks) Bam.
Right into the curio rack.
Oh man, all the family heirlooms!
- [Chad] Done. - [Logan] Done.
You know what I like about this scene?
You see a lot of people getting thrown through windows,
and they just stand up like, oh, it's no big deal.
But if you get thrown through a window,
or you have glass fall on you-
- [Chad] It hurts, yeah. - Yeah, you're gonna get cut.
That's just the nature of glass.
That's a nice little detail I like.
(keyboard clicks) All right, grab the poker.
Grab the poker, grab the poker now
And now she's going into the kitchen empty handed
against a knife, she's spider sensing it?
Definitely, you see some of Quentin Tarantino's influence
by all the kung fu films that he loved as a kid.
- [Chad] Which this film, I think, represents.
- Precisely.
(keyboard clicks) And she grabs a pan.
Chad, do you see that she's got a knife?
- [Chad] Yeah, I was just gonna say that. (laughs)
- So she knows she has a weapon
and instead grabs an improvised weapon.
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
All right, well she's defending with it.
Okay, so Vivica actually was able to disarm Uma
by slashing at the hand.
Uma counters by using her left hand to grab the weapon,
but because now Uma's locked in,
that enables Vivica to throw, what is that?
- A sidekick right to the torso.
- Right, and then boom, launches her.
Jumps in- - And just jumps, yeah.
- Double forces it, all right.
- She's like "I have to cook dinner, let's finish this."
- Yeah, you know, cooking dinner's a big deal
when you're a parent
- Yeah, right? - Yeah, it's a big thing.
(keyboard clicks) Nice jump there, look at that.
- [Chad] Olympic style.
- Okay, Vivica is doing like an "Under Siege."
You guys remember our "Under Siege" video?
Little come here action.
- And a little Bruce Lee going on there.
- [Logan] Okay, and these are some strange stances.
Okay, kids at home do not do this for multiple reasons,
but poor stance work. It's a big-
- So these are definitely bad stances by-
- Terrible. - Yeah.
- For both of them.
I mean, those are very kung fu-like stances.
No one's trying to flank.
It's definitely a director's choice,
because in a real fight, especially with weapons,
you want mobility.
It's just like a boxer.
You don't see boxers have these really wide stances,
because boxers need to move,
and we're gonna talk about that in a moment.
- [Chad] And ah, her daughter.
- [Logan] Right.
- [Chad] Vivica's character's daughter arrives.
Cool fight scene.
- Yeah, and today's fight scene
really has something for everyone.
We've got improvised weapons, actual weapons,
striking, some grappling, something for everyone.
- Let's break all this down. - Okay.
- Uma is now on the ground and Vivica now,
she goes into an axe kick motion
towards the head, which Uma does block.
It's a legit kick.
You do see it more from a standing situation,
not the most widely used, high percentage kick
in overall fighting.
A better option that Vivica could have done
was just stomp her out, just keep it simple.
She's right there, bring your knee up
(chuckles) and go right into the face.
The idea of just doing this, there's no need for it,
just get straight to the point.
But that gets defended, and so what happens now?
Vivica ends up now in front of the guard.
For me, this gets a bit interesting,
because this scene shows a perfect example
of how legs are dangerous, what happens?
Well, Vivica first gets hit in the groin.
And then, because her head's leaning forward,
the second leg hits her in the face.
So what should you know if engaging a downed opponent
when dealing with upkicks?
Well first, the stance, bladed stance,
good posture, lead leg, hands get involved,
split the legs by taking your lead leg
and putting it in one of the hamstrings.
In a fight context,
I personally prefer the straight hamstring
to create what's called a headquarters position.
From here, I can sit on that leg, keep my balance,
throw strikes, and find a way to get past the legs
to advance in the fight.
That would've been a much better option for Vivica.
- In this scene, Vivica sees a downed opponent.
She's armed.
She now brings the full weight of the weapon to bear.
Here, two-handed instead of one hand,
two-handed reinforcing it, square stance,
coming straight down, boom.
I honestly do not think
that she would've been able to stop herself
from sustaining some sort of damage.
Here, double hand, double force, boom, that's coming down.
That is definitely going to cause damage to Uma.
It was a good choice by Vivica
to do that double-handed strike down,
but it was a choice by Tarantino
to not have it be effective, and I understand that.
- So Uma kind of performs a variation of a tomoe nage,
a throw you see both in judo and jiu-jitsu.
Here's the action.
Defender controls the wrists here
and puts the foot right to the stomach.
Because I'm over-committing already,
it makes it easy for the defender to lift me up.
So, here we go, that's the lift effect,
and that's the throw that we see performed by Uma.
So after the throw performed by Uma,
Vivica does a big no-no.
She turns around and exposes her back.
It allows Uma to move forward into her rear naked strangle.
An opportunity that we have here,
it's actually an opportunity to talk about choke defense.
Vivica has her hands,
at first to the hand, which is correct.
The mistake that people do
is grabbing the wrist, forearm, or bicep.
This is not gonna work.
A proper strangle will cut through this.
Let's test it, one, two, three (choking).
(coughs) So, that mechanic cuts through fingers.
This is not the proper way
in how you wanna defend a strangle.
Grab the hand, and both of your hands should be doing that.
If Logan has a straight grip,
and I only have one hand to work with, so be it.
I shoot as far as I can to cover the hand like so,
and pull it down.
Once I can free this guy, I reinforce it,
and now, I get two hands involved.
This is a much better strategy
that Vivica could have done in moving forward
in defending that strangle,
especially since Uma did not have any hooks.
She can then combine this
with moving her lower body and getting out.
Although, we see in the scene, she eventually gets out
by using a poker and hitting Uma right in the head with it,
so I guess that works too.
- One other note,
Uma actually had a weapon in her right side,
so note that this is a perfect time for an ambush
without her opponent really fully realizing what's going on.
If this was a true fight, and Vivica starts defending
what she thinks is the primary weapon,
it's not the primary weapon.
This is my primary weapon.
Now we have ambush, here and here, the fight ends.
So, when a weapon comes into play in ambush,
the person that is being ambushed is not fully aware
of the gravity of the situation,
whereas the attacker is aware
that there's a weapon that can be deployed
and deploys it at the perfect time.
This is where timing counts.
She didn't say, "Oh, here's my weapon," right away.
She could have taken it out.
Later on, we see that's exactly what they do.
They go from ambush,
which would've been a superior tactical thing,
to dual, which as we've discussed before,
is not a superior way of deploying a weapon.
Of course, it was probably a choice by Tarantino
to have the fight progress.
So in this case, Uma is trained, very trained,
as we saw in other parts of the film,
and she just left the poker there
and walked into the kitchen,
like, oh, let's check out what's happening in the kitchen.
I don't believe that, because Uma just acted
like someone that didn't even do
what a normal person would do,
let alone a trained operative.
She knew that Vivica was in the kitchen.
And by the way, pro tip,
if you are ever ambushed in your own house,
your number one move needs to be to get out of the house.
What if you can't get out of the house?
What is your number two move? You go to your kitchen?
Because that's where you keep all your sharp objects.
Now, I understand that Tarantino
was going for the kung fu entertainment aspect of it,
but really, all Uma had to do
was bring in the poker at least, and then have it disarmed.
You can have a cool disarm scene happen,
and then the fight can progress exactly as it was shot.
Let's just say arguendo that Uma actually did in fact
grab the poker, and then she walked into the kitchen,
and then is attacked immediately by Vivica.
Here, oh wait, stay back.
At the very least, the instinctual thing
would be to whoa, what's going on here,
and at least keep them at bay.
Of course, Vivica's gonna follow up with something,
so she'll follow up with like a slash here, right here.
That would've made a lot more sense.
If you're gonna walk into a room
where you don't know anything that's going on,
except there's danger in there,
you're gonna want something, right?
- Yeah, she's gifted with a long rod
and doesn't know how to use it,
like some people in the world.
- [Logan] So at this point in the scene,
Uma decides not to take the poker
that she was just attacked with.
She also decides not to take her own weapon
that she's intimately familiar with out of her waist.
Instead, she grabs a frying pan.
That looks to be a cast iron frying pan.
You know those things weigh a ton.
We're gonna assume that it was not a cast iron pan,
that it was a lighter pan.
Even then, I don't know if I went against someone
that was trained with knives,
if I could move quickly enough to defend myself.
This is a very awkward kind of weapon.
It's heavier here rather than where you're holding it,
so it's not balanced at all.
We're also gonna assume that it is possible.
So we're assuming two things,
one, the pan's not that heavy,
two, it's not a cast iron pan.
So, with those two things in mind, we're now going to go
and see how Uma defended herself against Vivica.
Vivica comes in with a number one attack,
then that was defended, then a number two attack,
which was defended, a number one, again, that was defended,
a five that was defended here.
There was a number of number fives
that she was defending against.
And then, as she came in here, I'm not sure what happened.
I'm not sure what happened.
Here's the thing, Chad, can you put that against the pan?
And I want you to push this out of my hand.
There's no way that's coming out,
so the only way that a disarm could happen
is if she struck my hand, and I dropped the weapon.
So I believe that that scene was pure Hollywood.
Uma basically dropped the pan to progress the narrative
where it's there for entertainment purposes,
but is not at all based in reality.
Here we're in the final exchange between Uma Thurman
and Vivica, and the stance is just odd.
So Chad, can you get into Vivica's stance?
- [Chad] Like this, right?
- So we're here.
This is suboptimal for a number of reasons.
In terms of Uma's character,
note that she's purely defensive,
and honestly, the best defense is a good offense.
Here, she can't really retreat.
She has to literally turn and run, not a bad option,
but she looks like she wants to fight,
but is unable to fight.
Look how back weighted she is.
Likewise, Chad, can you extend your arm?
This is how Vivica's character was.
This is a fencer's pose,
and a fencer can do something like this, why,
because of the length of the fencer's weapon.
Here, this does not make sense.
This is actually not considered a hammer grip per se.
This is a saber grip, because it's forward, see that?
If I'm Uma, and this is what I'm seeing,
I'm going to a hammer or saber grip,
and I'm gonna press the attack now.
I can stay in the pocket, but I can just sidestep here
and take that and then flick out, flick out, and stab.
It does not make sense for the two of them
to be so defensive.
One of them has to launch an attack,
otherwise, you'll just be standing there forever.
Here, the roles are reversed.
If I'm Vivica, and I see this
that someone's being very defensive,
and they have it in an icepick grip,
I have a longer reach now,
as we saw in our "John Wick" video.
So once again, I'm gonna come in here.
I'm gonna come in here, boom, I wanna flank.
(bright music) (glass breaking)
- So in the fight scene between Uma versus Vivica
and their characters, I understand that the scene
is greatly inspired by kung fu-
- Cinema. Kung Fu Cinema - Cinema, right?
And so, with regards to the hand-to-hand portion,
there were certain things
that were somewhat in the right direction,
but mostly, (soft music)
compared to a realistic approach,
not really there, though it provided opportunity
for me to discuss about some defense,
which was showing to a certain degree, but not by a lot.
- Yeah, and to take what Chad just said
and extrapolate it to the weapons portion of it,
in terms of practical fighting, it wouldn't be done,
certainly not done by professionals.
It might be done by people that were amateurs, maybe, maybe,
but for professionals, no.
I didn't believe any of that.
So for me, I'm thinking it's a C, what do you think?
- I'm with you on that one.
I would say for the hand-to-hand portion,
I'd go with C as well.