Tarantino still hasn't a lot to say in Kill Bill 2, but he says it with such high style, you have to sit up and take notice.
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"I overreacted." --Bill
In "Kill Bill: Volume 2" a black-and-white prologue reminds the viewer that in Volume 1 a team of assassins gunned down a pregnant bride and her guests at a wedding rehearsal in a small chapel in the New México desert. Only the Bride survived, and she vowed revenge. When in "Kill Bill 2" she finally reaches Bill, her ex-lover and the leader of the assassin team, Bill explains his motives for the attack by using the aforementioned understatement. It's an example of the subtlety and restraint writer-director Quentin Tarantino exercises in the story's second installment, ingredients sorely missing from the first volume.
Readers who remember my reaction to "Kill Bill 1" will recall that I was much more impressed with Tarantino's visual style than with anything his film had to say, which was very little, indeed. When it came to blood, I said, Mr. Poe had nothing on this director, his first "Kill Bill" movie being drenched in the stuff.
This time, however, the director has moderated the blood output and replaced it with more dialogue and character development. As Tarantino says in the accompanying documentary, "Volume 1 is the questions; Volume 2 is the answers." With less constant, and therefore less tiring, physical activity and more emphasis on story, "Kill Bill 2" is the better movie. And, happily, it doesn't require that you have seen "Kill Bill 1" in order to appreciate "Kill Bill 2." Volume 2 is a self-contained unit, with only a short explanatory note needed at the beginning. Which may say something about the first volume, incidentally, that it can be summed up in a brief moment.
As I pointed out the first time around, "Kill Bill" was initially to have been one motion picture, but Tarantino was prevailed upon to turn it into two parts when it appeared the project would be unduly long for a single sitting. In my opinion, it would have benefitted from being a single film, but this second installment is practically the film I longed for in the first place. Volume 1 seemed far too much devoted to bloodshed for bloodshed's sake, but Volume 2 rectifies the situation with more heart and greater soul. It shows us what Tarantino can do when he isn't trying simply to be supercool.
Not that "Kill Bill 2" isn't still filled with plenty of old-fashioned action and bloodshed. Tarantino continues to pay tribute to the Hong Kong fighting flicks he loves so well; the Japanese anime, samurai, and yakuza gangster films; and the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns. Just to a lesser degree. And he still captures the martial-arts movements of his fight scenes with a combination of poetic grace and extravagant brutality. But this time there isn't as much combat. Put another way: The violence in "Kill Bill 2" is less extensive but more impassioned. Consequently, I was not fatigued by it as I was in Volume 1, and it made a more positive, memorable impact on me. It's perhaps a matter of there being too much of a good thing in Volume 1. A little violence done well is better than a lot of violence done only adequately. Note the few shocking scenes in "Psycho" as the best example. They amount to only a few minutes of the total movie, yet they live with the viewer forever.
Tarantino used violence in "Kill Bill 1" partly as homage and partly as spoof, to titillate, amuse, and arouse our senses, but after a while the violence became excessive and numbing. With "Kill Bill 2" there are only a handful of truly violent scenes, and they come off much better for the director keeping them in reserve.
Anyway, Tarantino's remarkable visual style carries the day in "Kill Bill 2," fused with actual feelings above and beyond a mere revenge plot. Tarantino continues to pull out all the stops, using every cinematic device at his disposal: Again we have the De Palma split screens, the eccentric Hitchcockian camera angles, the MTV quick cuts, the mix of black-and-white and color photography, and so forth. You name it and it's there, most of it used effectively, as always, to create a vivid personal statement.
So, you need a word about the plot? A woman is almost killed in a dastardly shooting and lives to get even. That's about it. Uma Thurman stars as the lady known alternatively as the Bride, the "Black Mamba," Beatrix Kiddo, and Mommy, who four years earlier was attacked and left for dead on her wedding day, the victim of a group known as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, of which the Bride was once a member. But she survived in a coma, and when she recovered she vowed vengeance upon all those who assaulted her and killed her loved ones.
In Volume 1 the Bride dispatched her first two rivals, Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). In Volume 2 she goes after Budd (Michael Madsen), Bill's brother, code-named "Sidewinder"; Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), code-named "California Mountain Snake"; and Bill himself (David Carradine), code-named "Snake Charmer." But gone are the blood-soaked forays into armies of opponents, the heroine killing them all with a single sword stroke.
Ms. Thurman has more opportunities to show off her acting skills this time around, too. Of course, she portrays her character as tough and resolute and resilient and athletic and all, but in several scenes she shows a remarkable sense of dramatic timing in her speeches as well, and in a flashback to her younger days she radiates a convincing schoolgirl innocence.
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