Release Date: April 16, 2004
Starring: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, Gordon Liu, Samuel L. Jackson
Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Written by: Quentin Tarantino
Distributed by: Miramax Films
MPAA Rating: R (violence, language, brief drug use)
“When I get to my destination, I am going to kill Bill,” says The Bride, determinedly, as she drives an open-topped convertible along the kind of twisting, deserted road that always used to turn up in classical Hollywood suspense thrillers. This is the noirish start of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2, the continuation of his homage to the kung-fu actioners of Asia made during the 1970’s, although before long -- about the time Tarantino switches from black-and-white to color film -- it has morphed into a modern-day spaghetti Western. The overall product is neither here nor there (it’s really a bit of both), but one thing is for sure: this hardly feels like the same movie as Kill Bill Vol. 1. Gone, mostly, are the egregious, chop-socky action sequences, having been painted over with the broad strokes of a personal drama that is less entertaining than it is fulfilling. Which begs the question: which Bill was the better film? And the answer is: The one we never saw -- the complete, combined opus that viewers were denied through an unfriendly mix of Tarantino’s emboldened sense of auteurism and Miramax’s shrewd sense of capitalism.
Stuck, as we are, with two (and maybe, eventually, three or four) Kill Bill movies, it should be said that viewers most certainly will not be disappointed with this resolution to the story that was begun in Vol. 1. In fact, thanks to a movie-opening soliloquy from The Bride (Uma Thurman), this is very nearly a standalone film. But those who’ve seen the first will be armed with the gory details: The Bride, once a professional hit woman in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, had her life all but destroyed when her former colleagues ruined (and then some) her wedding day by killing everyone present and leaving her for dead. In fact, she was only in a coma, and, four years later, she’s out for revenge. In Vol. 1, she dispatched two of the killers, and now she’s left to deal with the remaining three: Budd (Michael Madsen), Elle (Daryl Hannah), and the leader of the group, Bill (David Carradine).
Filmically speaking, Vol. 2 is a plainer film than its predecessor; in its simplicity -- some scenes are all talk and no action -- it lacks some of the experimental passion and flair that Tarantino so unabashedly foisted upon audiences in Vol. 1. In that movie, he worked the narrative like a thick lump of dough, kneading it and twisting it to suit his needs, jumping back and forth in time and resorting to alternative media (like the extended anime sequence that drove some reviewers to orgasmic levels of praise). The most creative thing he does here is to use black and white photography, which certainly has its uses but is by no means groundbreaking -- you almost get the feeling he used it so he could show Samuel L. Jackson in a cameo as a chain-smoking piano player; nothing looks better in black and white than well-shot cigarette smoke. In this sense Vol. 2 has the feel of scatterbrained compulsion, as if Tarantino, having begun a career-defining work in the first part, felt obligated rather than inspired to finish it in this installment.
Narratively, however, Vol. 2 is more interesting, because the story colors in a lot of the blank spots in Vol. 1 -- answers to questions both trivial (such as why Elle wears an eyepatch) and important (the sordid history between The Bride and Bill). It also gives the viewer more to latch onto, because whereas in the first film, The Bride’s opponents might as well have been cardboard cutouts, here, there is a more overbearing sense of humanity. In one scene (which is a good example of Tarantino’s occasional all-talk, no-action philosophy in this movie), for instance, Bill tries to convince Budd that he needs to prepare himself for The Bride’s inevitable visit, but Budd shrugs him off, slumped under a guilty weight that is almost tangible. “That woman deserves her revenge,” he says, “and we deserve to die.” No character would have said such a thing in Vol. 1.
This is one of the many staggering differences between the two films, and their sum is enough to make watching Vol. 2 an exhilarating exercise in unexpectedness, something rare in today’s formula-driven Hollywood. Another difference is that unlike Vol. 1, The Bride is no longer the movie’s sole focus, and Tarantino spends as much, if not more, time exploring Bill and the surviving members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. We get a whole chapter on Budd, for instance, who is played by Madsen as a cunning, if worthless, loner living in a trailer in the California badlands and working as a bouncer at a strip club that doesn’t have any patrons.
And then we finally get Bill, who wasn’t seen at all in Vol. 1 but makes quite a splash here; Carradine’s performance is the best of the film and on numerous occasions outshines Thurman’s. The veteran actor gives quite a bit of depth to the story’s main villain, and he has a perfect sense of timing and pitch when it comes to Tarantino’s famously talky dialogue. One of his best scenes is the one where he tells a story about the legendary kung fu master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu), whose signature move is something called the five-point palm exploding heart technique -- an elusive sequence of pressure points that causes one’s opponent to almost literally drop dead in his tracks. The scene also demonstrates Carradine’s complicated chemistry with Thurman, which has aspects of the professional, the familial, and the amorous; this bond makes their inevitable showdown in the final act all the more interesting.
As for Thurman, she rounds out her performance quite nicely here, and it should be said that Vol. 2 was far more demanding of her than Vol. 1. In this film she has to oscillate between cold-blooded determination, as when she is facing down Elle in Budd’s trailer (an enjoyable, smash-em-up, chop-socky scene, and one of the few in the film), and a girlish kind of hubristic naïveté, a free spirit waiting to be broken and rebuilt, as in the flashback sequence showing her training under Pai Mei. It is not a great performance, but it is a versatile, well-rounded one, pleasing in its offbeat consistency (something that could also be said about Thurman’s face -- with its high cheekbones, prominent nose, and deep, blue eyes -- which Tarantino likes to show in extreme close-up).
So, too, does Vol. 2 round out the Kill Bill story in a pleasingly consistent fashion. It is a different and fuller film, but also one that has the undercurrent of the first; the two are connected in a preternatural way that films like The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions never could be. The only downside is that those who were turned off by the gory, ultra-violent senselessness of the first film will probably not come back for this more dramatic and satisfying conclusion to the tale. But Tarantino has always lived on the edge of Hollywood, borrowing from and paying homage to its conventions but never fully submitting to them, so any deficiency of return business will surely have been calculated and even expected on his part. But no matter, because this very edgy and almost terminally hip filmmaker has once again bottled lightning: When Kill Bill is eventually combined on the same DVD, it will be Tarantino’s most ambitious movie and his best since Reservoir Dogs.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)