Til Death Do Us Part – now, get it right, this isn’t the 1969 British film based on the sitcom, that’s Till Death Us Do Part (“Till” with two “l”s); neither is it the 2014 Canadian slasher Death Us Do Part (no “Til”); nor the 2017 thriller with Taye Diggs, that’s ‘Til Death Us Do Part (with the appropriate apostrophe in “Til”, missing here) – opens with the lighting and score of a romcom, as the character of “Groom” (Ser’Darius Blain) prepares to get married, supported by a diverse set of groomsmen who look like the prospectus for some black-tie-only university. Among these groomsmen the standout is Orlando Jones – who recently shone as Mr. Nancy on American Gods but has been around for donkey’s years – though pro skateboarder/Rob Zombie regular Pancho Moler also rises above the general atmosphere of blandness.
Before we know it, though, we’ve jumped ahead – well, we’ve really jumped backwards, but let me spare you the confusion – to the apparent honeymoon, where the couple get talking to a weird and frankly unlikeable older couple who are very much in the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? mould. Most normal people would smile politely and make their excuses to leave, but not “Bride” and “Groom”, who instead decide to join them on their yacht for booze and bullshit.
Meanwhile, in another timeframe, “Bride” is hanging out in a really quite lovely house, enjoying its strange and interesting floorplan and the abundance of electric lighting that makes it look like a Paris brothel. Just as she’s busy, presumably speculating on how effectively its many points of ingress and egress could be used in creative action and chase sequences, she’s all of a sudden given a demonstration of the very thing she was just wondering about. For reasons that will remain unclear for most of the picture’s runtime, those diverse groomsmen from my first paragraph have surrounded the house and, in between Tarantinoesque arguments and comical ineptness, are trying to kill the Bride.
Tarantino is a clear touchstone here, and not only because it’s a bloody revenge tale focused on a kick-ass bride. Well, The Bride. But the groomsmen’s cheerfully banal conversations and smart attire recall Reservoir Dogs, and we’re given musical cues consciously reminiscent of True Romance, Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” (used in Pulp Fiction) and Tomoyasu Hotei’s “Battle Without Honor and Humanity” (Kill Bill, Vol. 1). Plus, star Natalie Burn, playing “Bride”, bears a mild resemblance to Juliette Lewis, who appeared in two early-90s flicks that QT scripted but didn’t direct.
Paradoxically, though, it’s when Til Death Do Us Part is content to simply ape Tarantino that it’s at its strongest. As a small movie, a killers-in-the-house escapade, it’s pretty diverting; its more ambitious side is revealed when could-have-been actor Jason Patric is aboard his yacht giving terribly long speeches that fail entirely to evoke Dennis Hopper in True Romance, Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction, or Robert Shaw in Jaws, and that’s when you’re liable to get fidgety. This is the earlier of the two timeframes that the picture cuts between, though I wish instead it had been simply cut. It also happens to be where the film reveals influences outside of Tarantino: the aforementioned Jaws, as well as the international assassin hijinks of La Femme Nikita and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And, of course, a bride running around a house trying not to get killed by her own wedding guests happens to have also been the premise of the unreasonably entertaining Ready or Not.
Those on the lookout for a Kill Bill derivative could probably do worse, but then again they could also do a lot better.