Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino;
Running time: 95 minutes' This film is rated R, 2004
Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen, Michael Parks, Sonny Chiba and Chiaki Kuriyama
Well, at least we find out how it ends. After two installments and four hours of running time, Kill Bill finally reveals whether it will fulfill the promise of its title. Now we can all move on.
Regular readers may recall that I was not fond of Volume 1 of Quentin Tarantino's epic homage to kung fu movies, spaghetti westerns, and Uma Thurman's feet. The good news is that there is less to dislike in Kill Bill Volume 2--no parents casually murdered in front of their children, no jokes about pedophilia or raping the comatose, a vastly diminished body count. The bad news is that there is just less in this sequel/conclusion. Where KB1 had the pace of an ADHD six-year-old on a sugar high, KB2 has been Ritalinized, its tempo slowed to a crawl in self-conscious, and self-defeating, imitation of Sergio Leone. It's two hours that feel like five.
First, a recap: The Bride (Thurman) has left her life as an international assassin in order to marry and have a baby. Unfortunately at her wedding (it's revealed in KB2 that it was really her wedding rehearsal--how's that for a plot twist?), she's gunned down and left for dead, along with the entire wedding party and, apparently, her unborn child. After four years in a coma, she awakes and seeks revenge on her almost-killers, namely former employer/lover Bill (David Carradine) and four other members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. In KB1, she dispatched two of them (Viveca Fox and Lucy Liu); in KB2 she concerns herself with two more (Michael Madsen and Darryl Hannah), as well as Bill himself.
The movie opens, as the previous one did, with a close-up of the bloody, wedding-dressed Thurman being shot in the head. From there it cuts to a shot of her driving a car along a lonely desert road. Actually, it's pretty obviously a shot of her sitting in a dummy car in a studio somewhere, with a lonely desert road projected behind her. Presumably, this is a deliberate stab at campy fakeness. So, too, one imagines, is the ensuing monologue, which Thurman offers the camera with all the conviction and sincerity of a phone-sex operator: "When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements refer to as a 'roaring rampage of revenge.' I roared. And I rampaged. And I got bloody satisfaction. I've killed a hell of a lot of people to get to this point, but I have only one more. The last one. The one I'm driving to right now. The only one left. And when I arrive at my destination, I am gonna kill Bill." Anyone who saw the first film will immediately recognize that this does not seem right; when it ended there were still three names on the Bride's death list. But, as he did in the first movie, Tarantino has decided to camouflage the extraordinary narrative simplicity of his story by telling it out of sequence. Only he hasn't, really: Following Uma's expository opening, KB2 doubles back and then unfolds in chronological order but for a few flashbacks. The car scene is just a gimmick, and a remarkably idle one.
Thurman tracks down Michael Madsen in El Paso; Darryl Hannah joins them soon after. One of the two winds up dead, the other debilitated. Along the way we're offered a flashback to the Bride's training by an abusive kung fu master. (Picture a cross between The Karate Kid and a women's prison movie; when he tells you to "paint the house" you damn well better paint it.) Then Thurman embarks on her foreseen car ride to meet Bill at his Mexican hideaway. There, the surprise that awaits her--though not anyone who saw KB1--is that the baby she thought she'd lost is in fact alive, and has grown into just the kind of precious moppet that has been shown to excel at selling Pepsi. Momma bonds with baby by watching Shogun Assassin (who says contract killers make bad parents?), and after putting her to bed, catches up with Bill. She left him, she explains, when she found out she was pregnant, because the baby "deserved to be born with a clean slate." Carradine in turn confesses that in massacring her wedding party and putting a bullet in her brainpan he may have "overreacted." Following this heart-to-heart, the Bride settles her dispute with Bill, and she and her daughter embark on what promises to be life of maternal bliss and Heckle and Jeckle cartoons.
There is something more than a little discomfiting about these concluding paeans to motherhood. (In the end credits, Thurman's character is listed as the Bride, "a.k.a. Mommy.") This is, after all, the sequel to a movie that reveled in scenes of mothers being killed in front of their young daughters. Thurman tells Carradine that moments after she discovered her pregnancy, she was attacked by a competing assassin. She pleaded with her would-be killer--"Right now, I'm just scared shitless for my baby"--who was thereby persuaded to let her live. Yet in the first movie, when Vivica Fox made the same plea on behalf of her four-year-old daughter, Thurman killed her without second thought or remorse and then told the little girl, "Your mother had it coming." One doesn't expect the Bride's behavior at every moment to be uniform--foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small assassins--but it would be nice if Tarantino made some minimal effort to reconcile these two scenes, offered some sign that he even remembered that this film's Mommy was last film's Mommy-killer.
Maybe it is progress of a sort--moral if not cinematic--that in KB2 Tarantino largely eschews the hyper-violence that characterized its predecessor. But rather than replace it with, say, clever dialogue, imaginative plotting, or meaningful character development, he's substituted the cinematic equivalent of dead air. He intends this to be a nod to the stately, deliberate style of Leone, but it's unaccompanied by any of the elements that made that style great--the use of landscape (both facial and geological), the musical crescendos (Tarantino borrows some Morricone tunes in KB2, but seems afraid of using them in anything other than a minor key), the rhythmic interaction of lengthy buildup followed by momentary violence. (Quentin prefers lengthy buildup followed by lengthy violence; it's not the same thing.) Leone was by nature a mythologizer; Tarantino is by nature a demythologizer. His killer-heroes are not silent, stoic types. They're video store clerks with guns, babblers on every subject from Madonna to French cheeseburgers.
At his best and at his worst Tarantino has always been a sensation junkie, who crammed his movies full of ingenious devices and memorable dialogue. But like KB1, the sequel is almost entirely devoid of these effects, instead focusing on an encyclopedic array of obscure movie references. It's hard to imagine that one viewer in a thousand will get half these allusions. (Did you recognize that the music playing when Thurman kills Carradine was borrowed from the early Burt Reynolds spaghetti western vengeance flick Navajo Joe? Me neither.) But Tarantino no longer seems interested in making intelligent movies for a large audience. Instead, he's offering gore for the masses and genre lessons for the film-geek crowd. Toward the end of KB2, Carradine delivers a short speech on what makes Superman unique among superheroes. It's utterly out of character and not all that clever, but it's nice nonetheless, a brief reminder of a time when Tarantino had so many pop cultural disquisitions in him that they overflowed his own movies and wound up in anything he touched, however briefly--the Top Gun allegory in Sleep With Me, the Silver Surfer bit in Crimson Tide. Back then, Tarantino was in the process of inventing a compelling new voice in film. Now, it appears, he's in the process of forgetting it.
Two things are readily apparent about Kill Bill Volume 2. First, unlike its predecessor, this is a complete movie. It stands on its own. It is possible to see and enjoy Volume 2 in a way that was not true of Volume 1. Viewed in retrospect, the first installment now seems like an easily discarded prologue. The real meat is in Volume 2. Secondly, Quentin Tarantino needs a new editor - someone who can convince him to make the really hard cuts. Sally Menke, who has held that post for all of Tarantino's movies, couldn't/wouldn't/didn't convince the ego-centric filmmaker that eliminating about 30 minutes of filler from Kill Bill Volume 2 would have made it a leaner, meaner motion picture. The running time is 130 minutes; it should have been about 1:30.
Gripes about the needless length are not minor. There are too many scenes in this film that damage the pacing. It feels bloated - as if the director, given the freedom afforded by lopping off 100 minutes and calling it Volume 1, could re-insert all sorts of material originally slated for the cutting room floor. (Do the math. If the original cut of Kill Bill was about 190 minutes, and the running times of the split parts are 108 minutes and 130 minutes respectively, that means Tarantino got an extra 40 minutes.) Rather than flowing smoothly, Kill Bill Volume 2 lurches from point-to-point, giving screen time to secondary characters who are neither colorful enough nor intriguing enough to warrant it. This is the case of a director having fallen too much in love with his material. Every scene is a child; he won't give it up. The result is that much of Volume 2, for all of its strengths, is self-indulgent.
That's the bad news. The good news is that, despite its lugubriousness, it's still a good motion picture - a clear improvement upon episode one. There's much less action, a lot more talking, and a legitimate effort to build the characters played by Uma Thurman and David Carradine. Those in search of a kung-fu gore-fest like Volume 1 will be sorely disappointed. There are a few action sequences (about four, depending on what you count as "action"), all of which are quick and brutal. There's nothing even as sustained as the one-on-one between Thurman and Vivica A Fox in Volume 1. Volume 2 is a talky affair. Although much of the dialogue isn't vintage Tarantino (except a scene like Bill's "Superman" monologue), there's no sense that the characters are inflicted with run-on-at-the-mouth disease.
Kill Bill, but talk to him first The movie picks up where Volume 1 ended, with the Bride (Thurman) gunning for her surviving two would-be assassins and Bill (Carradine). There's not much more to the film than that. Budd (Michael Madsen) takes longer to dispatch than the Bride plans, but Elle (Daryl Hannah) goes a lot more quickly. The confrontation with Bill involves more talking than fighting, a choice which fits the circumstances. About 50% of the movie is used to provide backstory. We get a lengthy flashback to events leading up to the wedding chapel massacre, as well as a lengthy training sequence in which the Bride learns to become an expert assassin under the tutelage of Pai Mei (Gordon Liu). (For those unfamiliar with the Hong Kong flicks that serve as Tarantino's main inspiration for this segment of the movie, think Yoda with a bad attitude.) The background material in Volume 2 fills out the characters nicely. The Bride even gets a name: Beatrix Kiddo. And, as hinted at during the last scene of Volume 1, she has a new role as well: Mommy.
From a stylistic standpoint, Tarantino pulls a lot of rabbits out of his hat. Parts of the movie are in black-and-white (and, since Thurman is dressed all in white, she appears to glow). There are shifts in the aspect ratio. (One sequence is in 1.33:1.) One fight scene involves a split-screen. A two-minute scene occurs in complete darkness. The soundtrack occasionally borrows from '70s exploitation scores, often with intentionally humorous results. Some of this is probably Tarantino showing off, but, for the most part, it provides a satisfying visual variability.
Use the Force, Uma If Thurman was good in Volume 1 as an avenging angel, she's better here, where the role requires a much greater range. We see a lot more of Beatrix than a woman bent on avenging her attempted murder, and Thurman never misses a beat. Volume 1 highlighted the actress' physical prowess; Volume 2 highlights her emotional capacity. David Carradine proves to be an apt adversary. He's calm and mature, with only a hint of danger in his eyes. He prefers words to weapons, and is apparently a loving father. One of the strengths of the film is that Tarantino and Carradine develop Bill into a person, rather than simply a cartoonish, frothing-at-the-mouth villian. Michael Madsen is his usual laconic self and Daryl Hannah plays against type as a conscienceless killer. Gordon Liu, a veteran Chinese actor, has a standout role lampooning the traditional kung-fu master role. (Count the number of times he flips his beard.) And there's an throw-away cameo by Samuel L. Jackson as an organ player.
I enjoyed Kill Bill Volume 2 more than Volume 1. The second movie is less kinetic but more satisfying. Tonally, the two films are different, which may be the result of the split. Hopefully, Tarantino's original, single-movie cut of Kill Bill will eventually be available on DVD. With the two parts re-knitted and much of the extraneous material removed, this could be a great motion picture, right up there with Pulp Fiction. As it currently stands, Kill Bill is a victim of its director's ego and its distributor's greed. The moments of greatness make it worth seeing, and there's certainly plenty of entertainment to be found here, but it's hard not to lament what might have been.
Tarantino not as long-winded detours, but as a way of setting up characters and situations with dimensions it would be difficult to establish dramatically.
In the action that takes place "now," The Bride has to fight her way past formidable opponents, including Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), the one-eyed master of martial arts, and Budd (Michael Madsen), Bill's beer-swilling brother, who works as a bouncer in a strip joint and lives in a mobile home surrounded by desolation. Neither one is a pushover for The Bride -- Elle because of her skills (also learned from Pai Mei), Budd because of his canny instincts.
The showdown with Budd involves a sequence where it seems The Bride must surely die after being buried alive. (That she does not is a given, considering the movie is not over and Bill is not dead, but she sure looks doomed.) Tarantino, who began the film in black and white before switching to color, plays with formats here, too; to suggest the claustrophobia of being buried, he shows The Bride inside her wooden casket, and as clods of earth rain down on the lid, he switches from widescreen to the classic 4x3 screen ratio.
The fight with Elle Driver is a virtuoso celebration of fight choreography; although we are aware that all is not as it seems in movie action sequences, Thurman and Hannah must have trained long and hard to even seem to do what they do. Their battle takes place inside Budd's trailer home, which is pretty much demolished in the process, and provides a contrast to the elegant nightclub setting of the fight with O-Ren Ishii; it ends in a squishy way that would be unsettling in another kind of movie, but here all the action is so ironically heightened that we may cringe and laugh at the same time.
These sequences involve their own Tarantinian dialogue of explanation and scene-setting. Budd has an extended monologue in which he offers The Bride the choice of Mace and a flashlight, and the details of his speech allow us to visualize horrors worse than any we could possibly see. Later, Elle Driver produces a black mamba snake, and in a sublime touch, reads from a Web page that describes the snake's deadly powers.
Of the original "Kill Bill," I wrote: "The movie is all storytelling and no story. The motivations have no psychological depth or resonance, but are simply plot markers. The characters consist of their characteristics." True, but one of the achievements of "Volume 2" is that the story is filled in, the characters are developed, and they do begin to resonate, especially during the extraordinary final meeting between The Bride and Bill -- which consists not of nonstop action but of more hypnotic dialogue and ends in an event that is like a quiet, deadly punch line.
Put the two parts together, and Tarantino has made a masterful saga that celebrates the martial arts genre while kidding it, loving it, and transcending it. I confess I feared that "Volume 2" would be like those sequels that lack the intensity of the original.
But this is all one film, and now that we see it whole, it's greater than its two parts; Tarantino remains the most brilliantly oddball filmmaker of his generation, and this is one of the best films of the year.
In all the films a working critic sees in a given year, maybe three or four brief moments fuse image, sound, and energy into a combustible rush. Less than a handful of times do you feel a director working at full throttle, using the medium in a way that prompts astonishment, delight, even gratitude.
"Kill Bill, Vol. 2" fills that quota and keeps going, delivering scene after scene in which the audience is picked up by the scruff of its collective neck and tossed playfully about the theater. If Quentin Tarantino is the Energizer Bunny of moviemakers, in this second installment of his Wagnerian revenge pastiche -- a film richer in every way than its illustrious, callow predecessor -- he has plugged back into depth of feeling and matched "Pulp Fiction" stride for stride. The result is insanely good, and the best time I've had at the movies in ages.
"Vol. 2" is both less and more than "Vol. 1." It's nowhere near as bloody, for one thing, a development that will come as a relief to weenies (such as myself) who don't really enjoy watching limbs get severed with bravura style. The martial-arts overkill that reduced the first film to a brilliant toy is replaced here with a more discursive yet oddly focused and confident approach. If "Vol. 1" was Tarantino's cross-riffing homage to the action movies of Japan and China, "Vol. 2" looks West to American and European art movies of the '60s and '70s and, above all, to the thundering spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. Not for nothing is repurposed Ennio Morricone film music all over the soundtrack.
Don't fret: You still get to see Uma Thurman's Bride lay enemies to waste. But you also get such chatty Tarantino set pieces as the Bride's ex-boss/ex-lover/mortal enemy Bill (David Carradine) explaining why Clark Kent represents Superman's lousy opinion of the human race. There's a becomingly maternal world-weariness to the film, too, in spite of all the high-flying kicks. When the Bride and Bill sit down for a discussion toward the end of the film, "Kill Bill" stands revealed as a relationship drama -- one of a particularly lethal stripe. As Bill himself admits, "There are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard." I think this is Tarantino's idea of couple's therapy.
Puckishly, the director finally gives us the beginning of "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" at the beginning of "Kill Bill, Vol. 2." We don't exactly see the wedding chapel massacre that put the Bride in that four-year coma from which she emerged as a vengeful Fury, but we witness the long run-up, in luminous wide-screen black and white. She has tried to ditch Bill and the assassin's life for which he tutored her, he and his minions have tracked her down, and as the two verbally parry on the chapel's dusty front porch, their faces sit like Easter Island close-ups on either side of the screen. The image references John Ford westerns, existential Antonioni dramas, the confrontations in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" -- at times, Tarantino seems hell-bent on recapitulating the entire history of the cinema.
But there are other fish to maim. "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" clicks into parched color as the Bride stalks the remaining members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. First up is Bill's kid brother Budd, played by Michael Madsen as if he were the last dishonest cowboy on earth. Budd has fallen on hard times: living in a trailer in the desert, can't even keep a job as a bouncer at the My Oh My Club, wears an existential funk almost as big as his hat. The Bride's encounter with him results in a sequence I advise claustrophobes to skip: Rarely has the crash of dirt hitting wood sounded more terrifying than when you're sitting in a pitch-black theater.
"Vol. 2," of course, was originally intended to be the back half of a single "Kill Bill," and you can tell where Tarantino has stretched the material to fit the new running time. The padding shows -- some of the early scenes go on a beat too long -- but with the arrival of Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), Bill's one-eyed troubleshooter, the film kicks into overdrive. The scene in which the two women finally settle their differences is a brilliantly sustained cadenza of creative mayhem -- it's ecstatic, resourceful, and edited with a sense of timing that leaves your jaw stuck to the floor. You could take the sequence out, offer it whole to the Academy, and it would win the best short film Oscar.
"Vol. 1" was ingenious mayhem, too, but it burned its fingers on decadence. The new film succeeds by stirring up the embers of what once passed between the Bride and Bill, and by, startlingly, exploring the no-man's-land of the Bride's matriarchal impulses. There's a lulu of a flashback involving an interrupted hit, a home pregnancy test, and two lady assassins staring down the barrel of the work/motherhood dilemma. Better yet, the sequence that opened "Vol. 1" -- when Vivica A. Fox's character was killed in front of her daughter and parents in the audience felt their stomachs fall away -- has its very appropriate bookend in "Vol. 2." I will say no more.
Other than to burble happily over the random elements Tarantino ladles into his neon mojito: Johnny Cash songs and Japanese baby-cart samurai films; Samuel L. Jackson's cameo as a former session man for every soul group who ever recorded and Gordon Liu's extended sequence as a kung fu sage with a flowing white beard; Elle's scholarly description of the effects of black mamba toxin on the central nervous system and the way the Bride staggers from a premature grave like a golem having a bad hair day. Carradine and Hannah reclaim their careers with ferocity, but Thurman's work is mighty in heart and deed, and she deserves whatever awards the brave dare to throw at her.
If you had chopped "Pulp Fiction" in two, the first half might have looked like the work of a freakishly gifted undertaker, too. Jackson's monologue at the end of that 1993 film gave the movie the exhausted moral weight it needed to matter, and so do the final scenes of "Kill Bill, Vol. 2." "You're not a worker bee," Bill reminds the woman who left him to live a boring normal life and whom he tried to murder for it. "You're a renegade killer bee."
He's right, but he forgets that there are different ways of being a renegade, and one of them is caring about other people. Quentin Tarantino knows it, and in this movie he risks admitting it. That sounds an awful lot like maturity, but whatever you do, don't tell him that.
When a writer-director -- Cameron Crowe or Paul Thomas Anderson, for example -- is in love with his characters, the fun comes when the filmmaker lets them gab away, inadvertently revealing themselves. The joy when Quentin Tarantino's creations speak is the opposite. Despite their hilariously florid rapping, his folks are also incredibly cagey: they never give the entire game away. This shrewdness is the template for the long dialogues in ''Kill Bill Vol. 2,'' the most voluptuous comic-book movie ever made.
In this deliciously perverse picture -- Mr. Tarantino delights in distending climaxes and emotional connections for so long we almost forget about conventional satisfactions -- everything is operatic, including the despair and the pauses. This is an epic of Conradian proportions (Robert Conradian proportions). Uma Thurman, whose speaking voice has a lyric, teasing quality -- if Dusty Springfield had been an actress, she would have been Ms. Thurman -- is just the performer to convey Mr. Tarantino's mordant slyness. (She also shows a rueful expansiveness that gives this film a heart.) His movies are about loss and betrayal, and ''Kill Bill Vol. 2'' is a double-burger helping of those motifs. It is rich, substantial and sustained, yet also greasy kids' stuff, a wrapper filled with an extra large order of chili fries, stained with ketchup, salt and cheese.
''Kill Bill Vol. 1'' was Mr. Tarantino's fourth movie, so I suppose that makes ''Vol. 2'' his fourth-and-a-half. ''Bill'' was broken into two, and the reasoning behind that decision is now evident. The parts could easily have been edited into, well, a single volume; it was conceived that way. But the two films are very different in tone.
The first episode was whipped into a tidal wave of blood lust. Unfortunately it was all setup: the longest first act in movie history, staged -- and edited -- like a series of Pablo Ferro trailers. ''Vol. 2'' provides the second and third acts in one convenient serving, told in a languorous flashback-within-a-flashback. It offers long, airy takes that suggest Visconti with attention deficit disorder; in other words it's the narrative style that Sergio Leone employed in ''The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.''
This semisequel, like its predecessor, offers a guided tour of Mr. Tarantino's sensibility, loaded as it is with pop-culture references that will sate even the most vulpine appetite for the stuff. (It could be subtitled, ''They Saved Tarantino's Brain.'')
All of the director's musical, film and comic-book loves are on display; he gives much play to the grungy martial-arts melodrama ''Five Fingers of Death,'' evoking its use of Quincy Jones's ''Ironside'' theme and plucking several of its plot devices. As befits that kind of density, there are more entrances, back stories and origins in ''Vol. 2'' than in the first hundred issues of ''The Amazing Spider-Man,'' Leone's ''Man With No Name'' trilogy and all the ''Shogun Assassin'' movies combined.
But unlike the 100-meter-high hurdles of ''Vol. 1,'' ''Vol. 2'' feels like a cross-country run, with hills and long stretches of flatland, as it settles into its casual, carnage-laden pace. It has the wily, extended cadences of Leone's movies, with the first 15 or so minutes filmed in loamy, luscious black-and-white and set in what could only be called exploitation-picture Texas. (What the master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro does with shadow, the director of photography Robert Richardson does with light, painting even the interiors with warm, bright flares. His harsh but loving glow permeates this adventure and, like Mr. Storaro's, his signature is instantly recognizable.)
''Vol. 2'' reprises some of the carnage of ''Vol. 1,'' in which the Bride (Ms. Thurman) goes maternal and breaks with the female-focused assassin crew managed by Bill (David Carradine) only to be pursued and punished along with the other guests at what would have been her nuptials. The Bride's name is now revealed: Beatrix Kiddo.
Bill isn't just being tender as he wipes her bloody, battered brow and calls her Kiddo; he's being businesslike. (This scene, also in the first film, has an unsettling grandeur; Beatrix's blood is all the more horrifying because it's in black-and-white, evoking B-slaughterhouse classics like ''The Honeymoon Killers.'')
When Bill arrives at Beatrix's wedding rehearsal, their entire romantic and professional background comes out, and then Bill and his team of mostly femmes fatales level the entire wedding party.
As in the first film, the Bride is on a mission of vengeance after being shot and left for dead. But this time out she's the unholy ghost, not the Friendly Ghost.
Beatrix, who also takes on the nom de guerre Black Mamba, calls her journey ''a roaring rampage of revenge.'' The movie is laden with lurid, revved-up sadism; as visited upon the heroine, it's the kind of violence most often associated with prefeminist exploitation pictures in which the attacks often had a sexual charge.
By using Ms. Thurman in the lead, Mr. Tarantino is able to give the suffering an emotional core that a masculine protagonist wouldn't provide, and he allows her some of the most primal suffering ever. He has ransacked almost all of the movies he has ever seen, including the obscure 1970's television film ''The Longest Night.'' Beatrix's subjection to one particular violation -- the one trap that you think she won't be able to fight her way out of -- is a devastatingly underplayed scene; it's about the danger she hears rather than sees.
Initially racked with terror, she has to focus on the obstacles at hand, so that she can take care of Bill and his gang, including the laconic Bud (Michael Madsen, who wrings every drop of moisture from his lines).
Many of the tortures of the damned that she undergoes come from Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), the homicidal kitten who has replaced Beatrix in Bill's bed and who finally goes blade to blade with her. Mr. Tarantino remembers how convincing Ms. Hannah is in her physical arrogance.
Displaying her gladiatorial confidence, she swings into battle with Beatrix in the trash confines of a trailer home.
Beatrix's other pummeling comes from her martial-arts master, the kung-fu instructor Pei Mai (Gordon Liu), who early in ''Vol. 2'' trains her in lethal skills that come to the fore in later battles.
With his long cat-hair beard and eyebrows, Mr. Liu, a veteran of scores of combat films -- including ''Vol. 1,'' in a different role -- returns to his Shaw Brothers roots as he's made up to resemble the blind-vengeance machine of Jimmy Wang Yu's ''Master of the Flying Guillotine.'' He uses words as weapons, too.
Talk is busting out all over in ''Vol. 2,'' which opens today nationwide. That conversational deviousness, which some may mistake for irony, was most visible in ''Pulp Fiction,'' released 10 years ago. It is why Samuel L. Jackson may be the perfect actor for Mr. Tarantino. Oddly enough, Mr. Carradine is up to the demands of the monologues -- originally written for Warren Beatty -- and he soars with cunningly self-serving sagacity.
The movie plays on Mr. Carradine's persona as Cain, the totemic star of the TV series ''Kung Fu,'' referenced by Mr. Jackson in ''Pulp Fiction.'' Yet Mr. Carradine bends the lines to his own shaggy willfulness; he delivers a Superman soliloquy lifted, in part, from Jules Feiffer's book ''The Great Comic Book Heroes,'' which also summarizes the director's ideas about character.
The immensely talented Michael Parks was also built for Mr. Tarantino's volubility. His respect for Mr. Parks and the actor's ear for confession is a sign of his appreciation of craft.
But the movie, which quivers with a geek-adrenaline rush, in some ways feels as if its time may have passed; it seems like a film Mr. Tarantino might have made before ''Pulp Fiction.''
''Vol. 2'' works like a multimedia mix tape, and Mr. Tarantino rides the tempo of his films like a D.J., abetted in the wheel-in-a-wheel trickiness by the deft fingers of his editor Sally Menke. When one of the characters in Vol. 2 makes an offhand remark about ''undisputed truth,'' Mr. Tarantino's actual forebear is clear: the R&B producer Norman Whitfield.
Mr. Whitfield was the link between Detroit slick (Motown) and funk (Parliament/Funkadelic). While adding a few licks of his own, Mr. Tarantino, like Mr. Whitfield, gets goose flesh from the evil that lurks within.
''Kill Bill Vol. 2'' is rated -- no kidding -- R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has strong language, rampant brutality, emotional and physical swordplay and chop-socky maiming, as well as alcohol consumption to ease the pain.
Uma thurman doesn't get nailed to a cross in Kill Bill Vol. 2, but writer-director Quentin Tarantino runs her battered character, called the Bride, through a gauntlet that is gory enough to make Mel Gibson flinch. No matter. You'll thrill to the action, savor the tasty dialogue and laugh like bloody hell. Tarantino has done more than continue the revenge tale he started in Vol. 1 -- the Bride wants payback after being left for dead in her wedding dress by Bill (David Carradine) and four other killers in his Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, of which she was once queen bee. Vol. 2 ties the events of Vol. 1 together, just like The Return of the King did for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. You watch and think, "I get it now." Tarantino has made the hottest mix tape in the history of cinema. Like a master DJ, he samples every lowdown, B-movie genre that formed him, from kung fu and samurai flicks to anime and spaghetti westerns, then filters it through his imagination to create something totally Tarantino: a blast of pure movie oxygen.
Vol. 2 dives into emotional waters merely skimmed in the brilliant exercise that was the first film. For those who think dividing Bill in half was a sucker punch to make us pay for the same film twice, I can only say that the sum of both films is what makes Kill Bill a triumph. I'd prefer four hours of untamed Tarantino to one film edited into a multiplex-friendly two hours.
OK, so where did Vol. 1 leave off? The Bride traveled to Tokyo to battle O-Ren Ishii (the sublime Lucy Liu) and to Pasadena, California, to slaughter Vernita (Vivica A. Fox), two of the five assassins who wiped out her wedding-rehearsal party in a chapel in El Paso, Texas. The Bride was pregnant with Bill's baby when he shot her in the head and put her in a coma for four years. The last words of Vol. 1 came in a question posed by Bill: "Is she aware her daughter is still alive?"
That's the bait. Vol. 2 begins with the Bride looking glam in a top-down convertible, addressing the audience like an avenging angel out of a 1940s Hollywood melodrama: "When I arrive at my destination, I am gonna kill Bill."
That's the hook. But first, Tarantino takes us back to that wedding chapel to show us the events before the massacre. The Bride is marrying an outsider, running from her old life. Then Bill shows up at the rehearsal, playing a flute and turning on the charm. "How did you find me?" asks the Bride with a grin. "I'm the man," says Bill, grinning back. And so he is. Carradine -- reduced to a disembodied voice in Vol. 1 -- owns the screen this time and is flat-out sensational in a role once intended for Warren Beatty. Bill is a pimp of death with a long line of protegees. Carradine, the hero of the 1970s TV series Kung Fu, invests this villain with a purring, seductive danger. He and the sizzling Thurman make the sexual tension between Bill and the Bride palpable. This is a love story lit by flashes of vivid violence. Tarantino, stingy with dialogue in the action-mad Vol. 1, gives the actors words they can feast on, full of sassy wit, as in the way the Bride introduces Bill to her groom. No fair telling how.
Vol. 2 keeps popping us with surprises, including the Bride's fight training under the cruel tutelage of Pei Mei, the white-bearded monk played by Chinese legend Gordon Liu. You might want to remember the five-point exploding-heart trick. Tarantino, working in tandem with martial-arts adviser Yuen Woo-Ping, keeps the action coming like gangbusters as the must-own soundtrack booms with his favorite musical influences, including Ennio Morricone's haunting theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Charlie Feathers going all rockabilly on "Can't Hardly Stand It."
The bonus this time is that the actors hold their own against the flying swords and fists of fury. Michael Madsen is killer good as Budd, Bill's beloved kid brother, who mistakenly thinks he can keep the Bride down by burying her alive. And Daryl Hannah mesmerizes as the eye-patch-wearing Elle Driver, the Bride's replacement in Bill's heart, not to mention a tough opponent in a showstopping catfight. Of course, all roads in Kill Bill lead to the Bride's face-off with Bill and the daughter she didn't know she had. Bill puts their kid to sleep with videos of Shogun Assassin. In a lovely touch, the Bride looks pleased. But there is hell to pay. Thurman gives an electrifying performance that busts your chops and breaks your heart with no mercy. Tarantino wouldn't have it any other way. With Kill Bill, both volumes, he wants to take us on a wild ride into the dirty fun of movies and do it so artfully that we want to return to the film to shake out its secrets. It's a bold swing, and Tarantino knocks it out of the park.
Quentin Tarantino veers a sharp right in his quest to guide the second "Kill Bill" installment off the beaten path. More character driven and less action-adventurish, "Volume 2" is the real deal.
The man himself (David Carradine as Bill) is front and center as the object of Beatrix Kiddo a.k.a. The Bride's (Uma Thurman) bloodthirsty desire. To back-story a bit, a very pregnant Beatrix was left for dead on her wedding day and came to vivid life four years later with revenge coursing through her veins. After annihilating two of the assassins sent by Bill to destroy her, Beatrix was bent on snaking her way through the homicidal pecking order.
Having made quick work of Copperhead (Vivica Fox) and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), renegade killer Beatrix sets her sights on the remaining members of Bill's Deadly Viper Assassination Squad: trailer-trashy Budd (Michael Madsen) and the venomous Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah). With more dialogue and less foreplay (not to mention swordplay), Beatrix The Bride wields her whipsmart words and smackdown skills with slick and sinister aplomb.
Flashbacks detail Beatrix's painful assassin training under the tutelage of Master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu) and the sanguineous chapel blues that were the final act of her attempt to leave a life of bloodshed behind her. Pai Mei's brutal tough-love approach has rendered Beatrix a virtual fighting machine, capable of extracting herself from the most malignant situations.
Death a la Tarantino is a rich and gruesome fate, ranging from permanent paralysis at the fangs of a deadly Black Mamba to being buried alive courtesy of the Danish thriller "The Vanishing" (which left me in a wet-rag sweat). Other scenes feature a mano a mano catfight -- a startling exclamation point to the concept of bitch-slap -- and the perennial movie classic, the five-point palm exploding heart technique, learned at the hands of the wicked Pai Mei.
"Kill Bill 2" treads emotional waters that barely rippled the surface of "Volume 1." Motivations are examined, and vulnerabilities are implied and understood. Tarantino has crafted an invigorating film experience encompassing a hedonistic smorgasbord of technique; balletic violence, deep-dish discourses and relentless homage to his beloved spaghetti westerns and chop-socky classics.
Thurman knocks one out of the park as The Bride, swaddled in the security of her thirst for revenge while fanatically pursuing her goal: To kill Bill. Hannah is a malevolent delight as Thurman's vicious, eye-patched rival, and Carradine embodies the essence of the "Kill Bill" sensibility -- cruel, villainous and bewitchingly acid-tongued. Payback has never felt so sickly sweet.
When we last left The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (now on video and DVD), she had exacted bloody vengeance on two of her former assassin partners (not to mention a seemingly endless horde of Yakuza gang members) on her quest to take out her ex-boss/ex-lover, Bill (David Carradine). Think of this as Sergio Leone (The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly) directing a film with kung fu action about Charlie's Angels�except that they're not really the good guys, there are five of them, one of them is a man, and the protagonist wants to kill Charlie for destroying her life. Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to combine the exploitation B-movies of the '70s with spaghetti westerns, kung fu, and pop-culture ridden dialogue that plays like modern day Shakespeare.
Kill Bill Vol. 2 picks up where Vol. 1 left off, beginning with that campy movie trailer of The Bride in a convertible, telling the audience that she will have her revenge. From there, the film delivers the final chapters of the story, beginning with a recount of The Bride's wedding day massacre�well, wedding rehearsal massacre anyway. We also see a flashback of her intense training in martial arts under the "cruel tutelage" of Kung Fu master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu). And oh yes, we see her confront the two remaining assassins (Michael Madsen and Daryl Hannah) before getting the chance to kill Bill.
How exactly does one go about reviewing a film like this for a Christian website? Some Christians will watch anything Hollywood has to offer, while others avoid movies and theaters like the plague. And there are plenty between those extremes. Suffice to say that if you're offended by bad language, by less-than-scrupulous characters, and/or by scenes of strong violence�regardless of whether it's hyper-realistic like The Passion or comic book-styled like The Matrix�this film is definitely not for you.
Actually, the biggest surprise about Kill Bill Vol. 2 is that it's not the bloody orgy of violence that marked Vol. 1. Sure, it has its moments�one fight sequence ends in an especially grotesque manner, and you're not likely to find a more horrifying snake attack in film any time soon. But for the most part, the action is stylized kung fu, no worse than your average superhero movie or Lord of the Rings battle sequence. The aforementioned wedding rehearsal massacre isn't even shown on screen.
Stranger yet, Vol. 2 is a love story at heart, albeit love gone wrong. This is an unexpectedly talky film, and therein lies its charm. Director, writer, and producer Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs) is a master storyteller, and I wholeheartedly agree with critics who have noted that Tarantino absolutely loves his characters. Complex in motivation, vividly imagined, and richly versed, every one of them gives a worthy monologue to help flesh them out and remain unforgettable. The exchanges between Bill and The Bride are terrific, speaking volumes of a twisted romance that has since run its course with equal doses of sweetness, melancholy, and menace. There's an additional level of sweetness to the story as The Bride gradually uncovers the truth about her mysterious motherhood.
These monologues give the characters a level of depth rarely seen in films today. The extended sequences of dialogue demonstrate that even villains like Bill and Budd (Madsden) have their charm, making their evils all the more shocking and giving the film's action and deaths more resonance. I found myself hanging on Bill's every word as he retold the legend of Pai Mei to a younger Bride before sending her off to study with him; it wouldn't be at all surprising if David Carradine earns a Best Supporting Actor nomination. And the beard-twirling Pai Mei is likely to endure as one of the most beloved characters in recent cinematic history�chauvinistic, cranky, yet charming, he makes Master Yoda look like a sissy.
Every character is given a chance to shine, no matter how small the role�from the minister and his wife at the wedding chapel to Bill's suave surrogate father Esteban (played by Michael Parks like a Hispanic Jack Nicholson). And that's why Vol. 2 shines that much more than Vol. 1. It relies on the strength of its storytelling instead of extreme shock value, as the first largely did. Both movies do succeed (in different ways), adding up to a satisfying three-and-a-half hour experience. Those wishing to avoid the extreme violence and nastiness of the first film can still enjoy the second by itself, though you'll lose some character development in the process.
Tarantino uses more than writing to tell his tale effectively. There are visual shots that are framed like film noir or graphic novels, often allowing the images to communicate at least as much as words. He often switches between black & white, color, and faded color to place scenes in chronological context. There's also a brilliant scene in which The Bride is buried alive, filmed in darkness from her perspective with nothing but sound to envelope the audience�it's a chilling and suspenseful experience.
Of course there's also the action as choreographed by the great Gordon Liu, far more satisfying than that found in the last two Matrix movies. Some of the stunts will blow your mind because they're so fast and unexpected. On top of all that, Kill Bill Vol. 2 is consistently funny. With past films, Tarantino had a tendency to make audiences laugh at sick and uncomfortable things. Here the humor is rather dark, but generally more appropriate�akin to Monty Python in some cases. Again, Pai Mei steals the show in his crazed-but-wise belittlements. There's also Budd's conversation with his boss at the roadhouse bar, in which we can relate to both sides of the argument. Tarantino is also increasingly comfortable working with kids, and there's a scene between parent and child that is absolutely precious in the way it captures both shyness and playfulness.
Still, it is typical Tarantino in many ways, and Christians must decide for themselves if the violence, language, and overall subject matter are tolerable or offensive. Much like the classic spaghetti Westerns and kung fu flicks, Tarantino paradoxically manages to glorify and condemn the violence of his characters. It's entertaining, but not edifying. Does a movie have to be both? If so, I'd recommend skipping it�although Kill Bill Vol. 2 is undeniably enjoyable filmmaking, unpredictable in its storytelling and wholly original in its characterizations.