KILL BILL VOL. 2
After watching the first part of Tarantino's epic revenge pastiche, I wondered in this space whether there wasn't a great movie to be had by trimming and condensing the two parts into one. Now comes word that Tarantino plans to show a combined cut at Cannes and at a few theatres in the States (and which will no doubt appear on a DVD double dip at some point in the future). I doubt this will be the great single movie I had envisioned; to make the two parts a cohesive whole, there would have to be some serious rejiggering. And it doesn't appear as if QT has much interest in cutting anything; Kill Bill Vol. 2 features no fewer than three credits sequences at the end (including a noir tribute clearly intended for the beginning of the film which has been slapped on the end as if QT couldn't bear to part with it).

And, as it turns out, that's OK. In its current incarnation, the two parts are so tonally disparate that one almost buys Tarantino's ridiculous statement that he intended the thing to be two parts all along. Where Vol. 1 was a nonstop barrage of action and pop-infused eye candy, Vol. 2 is almost ruminative in parts-if the inspiration of the first part was Eastern action cinema, the Western (by way of Leone) aesthetic guides the second. There is more of Tarantino's distinctive dialogue, and on-screen action is kept to a minimum, with the exception of a bang up brawl between the Bride (Uma Thurman) and Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah) in cramped quarters that rivals the visceral kick of the knife fight that kicked off the first film (or the train compartment fight in From Russia With Love, my personal gold standard for cringe-inducing brutality).

A somewhat tangential note on Tarantino's distinctive dialogue: someday, someone will write a great monograph on Tarantino's strength as a writer/director, which seems to be knowing exactly how his dialogue will sound on-screen. I read some of the script for Kill Bill (this was before it was split, and I stopped after the first three chapters to preserve the surprise of the movie), and the dialogue looked absolutely awful. I wondered if Tarantino had lost or squandered his gift. Yet on the screen, it seems natural (in his heightened, movie-cool way) and every bit as snappy as in his earlier efforts.

The plot is so simple it obviates description. It continues the Bride's quest to "get bloody satisfaction" by killing each of her former partners in the "Deadly Viper Assassination Squad" of high-paid, super-skilled killers for hire, who murdered her wedding party and left her for dead some four years prior. We meet Bill's brother Budd (Michael Madsen), who has left the squad, lapsed into alcoholism, and lives with a sense of the grim inevitability and deservedness of his death. There's a flashback to the Bride's training in China by the rather sadistic martial arts master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu, who played the leader of the Crazy 88s in Vol. 1), which goes a long way toward explaining (again, in movie-sense) how the Bride got to be so damn tough. There's a showdown with Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah), and the final reunion of the Bride and her former lover and master Bill, who has a surprise for her in the form of BB, the child she'd long assumed was dead.

As in Vol. 1, there's not much to redeem the pervasive violence. Some critics have taken the film to task for this, believing that the film would have been better as a serious exploration of the moral ambiguity of revenge and the ultimate meaninglessness of violence. I've got news for them-nobody's going to top Hamlet for that. This just ain't that film, folks--it takes place in a world of filmic construct where the only meaning is provided by the violence. It's not an examination of the world in which we live, it's a celebration of the movie world that exists and ferments inside Tarantino's head. Just as the "Our Feature Presentation" clip before Vol. 1 signaled the audience's entry into this world (and, as a film-loving child of the 70's, that scratchy clip with the funky music caused my heart to beat double-time), Vol. 2 begins with an obvious black and white process shot of the Bride driving to meet her destiny as she recaps the past film in overblown movie trailer style. Though parts of the film feel more grittily realistic, they're no more "real" than this shot. It's all part of my world, says Tarantino, from the Leone homage at the El Paso wedding chapel to the grainy stock and crazy Shaw Bros. zooms of the Chinese training sequence. Jackie Brown was a mature, adult film by Tarantino. Kill Bill is something else entirely, a labor of, and about, love-love of movies of all kinds and the worlds to which they transport us. I'll take Tarantino's patently unrealistic revenge fantasies over the manipulative pseudorealism of Man on Fire any day.

As in the first part (and, given Tarantino's track record of getting unprecedented depth out of his actors, I have no idea why this would continue to be the case), the biggest surprise is the acting. Uma Thurman continues to impress with her awesome physicality and note-perfect line readings. Madsen is perfectly sodden and puffy, with the tired resignation of a man who's given up on living but isn't quite ready to die. David Carradine is a wonderfully noble shambles. He knows he's a bastard, but can't help himself. He destroys the Bride's life because she has broken his heart; we come to understand the depth of his heartsickness during a nicely played scene in which Bill appears at the chapel before the massacre. I admit I had my doubts going in, but Carradine is fantastic in the part. Tarantino originally wrote the part for Warren Beatty, and in some of Bill's more conspicuously "cool" dialogue (especially in Vol. 1) you can hear Beatty's voice. But I doubt Beatty would have managed to be as genuinely touching in the part-a mean sonofabitch to be sure, but one who sought only to preserve his "family" through whatever means necessary.

In the end, the themes of motherhood, love, and regret give Vol. 2 a poignancy that's absent from the pure adrenaline high of the first part. But I'm not holding my breath for the haters of Vol. 1 (and there were many) to hop on board with this one. Many were quick to jump on the "Tarantino's lost it!" bandwagon with the release of Jackie Brown, a film that most of its initial detractors admit has aged well and is better than they originally gave it credit for being. I suspect that in a few years--who knows how many, given QT's glacial filmmaking pace--when we're able to view it in the larger context of his oeuvre, this film will be respected for what it is. Maybe we'll get that reedited masterpiece that I suspected might be possible. Maybe not. For now, I am grateful to have been given a movie that seems to have been engineered to tickle the pleasure center of my brain (and this is both Tarantino's great gift and the reason for his divisiveness), rekindling that joy I felt at an afternoon matinee as a kid. It's a good time at the movies, and, given the current state of commercial moviemaking, that's more than enough for me.

5 out of 5