Kill Bill Volume 2 review

2004.04.29 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

Kill Bill Volume 1 gave us our first look at the Bride, Uma Thurman. Now Kill Bill Volume 2 completes the tale. Volume 2 is less of a dizzying dance of destruction than Volume 1, but it has its moments. The real spice is in the melodrama.

We know from the first part that the Bride was gunned down in a chapel, while pregnant, by her former boss, Bill. After recovering from a four-year coma, the former assassin struck out for revenge on Bill and his team.

While Volume 1 took place largely in Japan, where the Bride retrained herself and targeted her first victim, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Volume 2 takes place largely in California, where Bill (David Carradine) and his remaining cronies are located, and carries a different tone: more reflective and less bloodthirsty.

Writer/director Quentin Tarantino has constructed the disjointed tale carefully. In Volume 1, he started with the demise of Vernita Green (Vivica A Fox), even tho it came later chronologically. In terms of drama, it was best suited to the introduction, so that's where it went. Volume 2 is more linear, showing flashbacks only to days long past, such as the lead up to the chapel massacre and the Bride's original training in China.

The story sees the Bride thru the final stages of her revenge to her climactic meeting with Bill. For me, unfortunately, the surprise was ruined by a clip I happened to see somewhere, but it's enough to say that Tarantino give his heroine a satisfying ending. There's plenty of Tarantino's patented dialog altho not always smoothly integrated into the characters, as when Bill compares Superman to other superheroes and to then to the Bride. Tarantino might as well have walked on camera and given the speech himself.

Uma Thurman is radiant in all situations, carrying the bulk of the film(s) on her delicate shoulders. She shows strength, resolve, love, hate, fear, and desperation, moving quickly and smoothly from one to another. The other female actors do nearly as well. Tarantino's female characters should be a model for every screenwriter. Some are wicked; some are good; but all are strong and self-possessed—not to mention deadly with a Japanese sword. In Kill Bill, it is the men who are weak, dependent, jealous, and heartbroken.

I'm not so fond of Tarantino's love of kitsch, as when a moment of melodrama is accompanied by a scratchy, noirish musical sting, or when characters drive cars with obvious 40s-style projected backdrops. This kind of stylized filmmaking is going to age fast and seem gimmicky, like European psychodelic psychodramas of the late 60s. Other writers and directors would do well to study Tarantino's thematic structure and characters and not his "style."

But Tarantino infuses Kill Bill with enough pulp make it rock. He borrows heavily from Asian chop-socky and samurai films, American exploitation and noir, and God-knows-where-else (well, just ask him; you may have trouble getting him to shut up), but probably nothing you've ever seen before, so it doesn't seem derivitive. It's a clean, tightly-knitted tale of revenge and regret; and it stands well above your garden-variety action flick.

f e e d b a c k

s i d e b a r