Film Review: KILL BILL VOL. 2 **** (out of 5)
The deadliest woman in the world, a.k.a. The Bride, continues a revenge quest against her former associates, moving ever closer to Bill, the mentor who could not let her go.
And after the longest first act in the history of Western cinema, Quentin Tarantino’s magnum “grind house” opus Kill Bill finally settles into some storytelling with resonance. Where Vol. 1 was the quintessence of a fairgrounds roller-coaster, all speed and frenzy and showy quotation, Vol. 2 plunges into the world Tarantino has created, as only he can, and soaks us in archetypal narrative twists and the radiance of Uma Thurman at the peak of her beauty and talent. If the first half was light as rice paper, the second delivers the weight of a pulp novel, revealing The Bride’s relationship with Bill, the training that turned her into a superhero capable of overcoming any obstacle, and Tarantino’s own ruminations on single motherhood and the true meaning of Superman — not Nietzsche’s Übermensche, of course, but the Jerry Siegel-Joe Shuster comic book creation.
I was not particularly blown away by Vol. 1 back in October for a variety of reasons – mostly put off by the universal praise heaped on the movie (nothing is that good, nothing) from critics who didn’t get Jackie Brown, among many, many other things, and by Tarantino’s own arrogant loud mouth in interview after interview, trashing the giants whose shoulders he’s regularly trampled and will never surpass, beginning with their well-documented social grace and enough humility not to take themselves seriously.
But not all great filmmakers are good dinner companions. I have since seen Vol. 1 again and if there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a movie critic who can’t admit when and where he/she/it was wrong. I was feeling sour about the man himself at the time, while the movie was actually pretty freakin’ entertaining, or in the words of my Shotgun Reviews colleague Kyle Duvall, “balls to the wall crazy fun,” no two ways about it. I’ve also seen and heard it compared to a dance movie, and while I’ll concede that it shares some ideas and conventions with a film like An American in Paris (1951), which was also a case of pure style-as-substance, Vol. 1 strikes me more as an extended opening movement in a symphony, or better yet, a great big phantasmagoric overture of grind house themes before the main operatic event.
Tarantino split his epic in two, it turns out, because he wanted to preserve one tone and tempo for the first half, and drop into a wholly different arrangement for the second. Okay, whatever: one of his trademarks as a storyteller is his mastery of the sudden tonal shift, a sleight-of-hand he’s been known to perform more than once in a single scene, and the compleat Kill Bill is his biggest anthology film, a collection of 10 or so interconnected stories he calls “chapters,” each with their own particular style and attitude. Some chapters hearken to a specific cinematic tradition, like the Shaw Brothers’ films or the unique style of Japanese animated features, others draw from a variety of genre templates that have been blended and filtered through Tarantino’s rambunctious, B-movie loving sensibilities.
Even so, Kill Bill Vol. 2 definitely has a more somber overall mood to it, semi-elegiac, you might say, because it never loses its sense of fun. Tarantino has saved all of the narrative surprises for the second half. But as the Bride moves inexorably closer to her principal quarry, the seriousness of revenge takes hold of the film’s entwined stories, and the art of elegy has the last laugh.
Here we discover what really happened on the day of our heroine’s wedding rehearsal, a joyous occasion which Bill turned into a brutal massacre. Introduced by the Bride, talking straight to the camera as she drives through the rear-projection dream world of a 1950s drive-in quickie, the chapter puts the brakes on the gore and performs the much harder task of making its violence palpable through dialogue and suggestion. Tarantino shows us a little of what Bill and the Bride were like together, while the specter of death lurks just out of camera range.
David Carradine makes his official entrance in this sequence, playing Bill with a magnetic charm we never could have suspected from his brief cameos in Vol. 1. In those little thematic blips he was nothing more than a purring voice, a stock villain saved only by a couple of well-written lines. In Vol. 2 he shines, his long-ago familiar TV face now as aged as a mountain range, but still capable of breaking into such a winning, good ol’ boy smile there is no doubt how The Bride could have loved Bill. In fact, she still might, and he certainly still loves her, a sticky development that hangs beautifully over the entire movie and is its greatest source of tension. When Bill later compares the Bride to Superman, in the film’s best Quentinesque speech, he is also talking about himself, a dark force of nature whose real disguise is not his superhero costume, but his ability to fit in with the masses, to seem like your average Dad-next-door.
We’re also given hints of how The Bride became Black Mamba, a superhuman warrior who could take on the Crazy 88, a swarm of Japanese swordsmen in Vol. 1, and destroy the whole crew. A chapter called “The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei,” introduces a witty Chinese sage who is one of my personal favorite characters in either half of the saga. Asian superstar Gordon Liu nearly steals the movie as the cruel martial arts master Pai Mei, a petulant grandfather who puts the Bride through the most grueling, pitiless training program in any Western-made film I know. No romantic “wax on, wax off” from this guy; either your resolve is made of steel or it isn’t.
Interestingly, the going becomes rougher for the Bride in Vol. 2 as she makes a few mistakes which give her enemies an edge. Perhaps it’s because she is not so guarded with her Western foes (if I had wiped out the Crazy 88, I might be a little cocky, too), perhaps it’s because Tarantino simply had some great set pieces in mind and wanted to put her through more hell before the climactic showdown. Either way, it has been clear from the beginning that plausibility has never been part of the Kill Bill equation, or the films Tarantino is emulating. He has called this project his Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), a heightened pastiche of old movies, made flashier and more vivid than the original budgets ever would have allowed. In Vol. 2, the Bride’s trials pass beyond movie lore to hint at Edgar Allan Poe, Peter O’Donnell (Modesty Blaise), and who knows what else Tarantino has read.
For that matter, what I liked most about Kill Bill Vol. 2 may be the thing that fans of the first half will find least satisfactory: Tarantino’s encyclopedic influences, which are clearly global and cross-disciplinary, subside and become hidden in the general texture of his story, as they are in his first three films. There has been some talk about Vol. 2 being more influenced by the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, but there were plenty of blatant Leone references in Vol. 1, particularly in the music. For the finale of Kill Bill, the writing and the filmmaking merge into vintage Tarantino, a brilliant action director who also knows how to spring a narrative surprise, casually mount a little unbearable suspense, or just stop everything for some interesting and necessary conversation between his well-imagined characters.
Uma is magnificent in both films, which is not an easy thing to be in a Tarantino epic; some scenes may require multiple changes of heart, with good comic timing and emotional depth in equal measure. But she finds the through line every time, manifesting nothing less than a modern day Nemesis, a ruthless Mother/Goddess on the cusp of East and West to be contemplated with awe and wonder. The Bride is Tarantino’s paean to single motherhood, in the form of a righteous kung fu mistress with her priorities in order, and as such she is, like all the best superheroes, an example to everyone after all.
This isn’t idle speculation, either: Tarantino was raised by a single mother, and he has a particular distrust of fathers running through his work, whether they’re surrogate or biological, that makes Darth Vader look plain and bucolic. Consider Joe Cabot, mastermind of the heist in Reservoir Dogs, who is stern, practical, and absent when you need him most; or Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, a patriarch about as cuddly as the vengeful God of the Old Testament. Bill, a.k.a. “Snake Charmer,” is the director’s most fearsome father figure yet, a seductive, down-home Machiavelli whom you can be sure has been plotting your death since before you were born.
All of the Bride’s personality is revealed in Vol. 2 — her great capacity for love and mercy as well as her titanic skill at murdering others — and I think it is the better volume because of it. It’s not just that the thick crust of pastiche melts away, uncovering the chewy seriousness at the center of Kill Bill, it’s that Tarantino’s personal obsessions rise to the surface (Uma Thurman, motherhood, trust and betrayal in families) and imbue the story and characters with a palpable sense of real mortality. One of his signature strengths has always been an ability to make criminals and sociopaths seem likeable and ordinary, by giving them concerns like yours and mine; in Vol. 2 he turns that trick again, revealing new wrinkles throughout the entire opus.
I still think Kill Bill could have, should have, been tightened, edited and released as one film, tonal changes and all, but Tarantino obviously doesn’t make movies for me, and it’s not like there aren’t admirable precedents for such self-indulgence going all the way back to the silent era. Like it or not, Kill Bill is one of the most original movies of a decade that is fast approaching the halfway point, a work that is at once irredeemably crass, iconoclastic and reverent, sprawling, incorrigible, occasionally unforgivable, and now and then sublime, reminiscent of William Butler Yeats’ dictum: “Art that doesn’t attempt the impossible is not performing its function.”
Kill Bill Vol. 2
directed by ; screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, from character created by “Q and U” (Quentin and Uma); director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Sally Menke; music by Robert Rodriguez, The RZA
with: Uma Thurman (The Bride), David Carradine (Bill), Daryl Hannah (Elle Driver), Michael Madsen (Budd)
2 hr., 20 m.; Miramax, rated R
release date: April 16
Notes:
THE ENABLERS: Not nearly enough praise has been directed yet toward Kill Bill’s cinematographer Robert Richardson, who gave the two volumes their dazzling array of multiple palettes and shooting styles. Richardson has often performed the exact same duties in the past for Oliver Stone, with whom Tarantino once conducted a very public feud. Hmm, interesting.
And it’s about time everybody thanked Tarantino’s self-effacing secret weapon, veteran editor Sally Menke, who has helped QT shape every one of his films. Next time you’re grooving to the “Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves” sequence, remember to use that pause button to admire a bit of her craftsmanship, too.
THANK GOD HE WOKE UP: Tarantino originally planned to take the role of Pai Mei himself, an interesting clue to how he sees himself as Uma’s director, and as our narrator, but he wisely stepped down and merely dubbed the old man’s voice.
HE CAN PLAY ANYTHING: Keep an eye out for the brief cameo by Samuel L. Jackson.
Eric Barker is a writer and independent filmmaker living in Denver.
