director/screenwriter
Quentin Tarantino
producer
Lawrence Bender
cinematographer
Robert Richardson
music
The RZA
Robert Rodriguez
editor
Sally Menke
cast
Uma Thurman (The Bride)
David Carradine (Bill)
Michael Madsen (Budd)
Daryl Hannah (Elle Driver)
Gordon Liu (Pai Mei)
Michael Parks (Esteban Vihaio)
Perla Haney-Jardine (B.B.)
Chris Nelson (Tommy Plympton)
Bo Svenson (Reverend Harmony)
Sid Haig (Jay the Bartender)
Samuel L. Jackson (Rufus)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 137m
u.s.
release: 4/16/04
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other quentin
tarantino films
reviewed on this website:
- jackie
brown
- kill
bill - vol. 1
- pulp
fiction
- reservoir
dogs
- true
romance (script
only)
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Now that all four hours and
eight minutes of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill saga have
unfurled, it's easy to see the bridge between the two halves.
If Vol. 1 was about action, Vol. 2 is about consequences.
Having indulged in an orgasmic display of sword carnage near
the end of the first part, Tarantino knows he can't top himself,
and he doesn't try; he slows his pace considerably, drawing out
lengthy dialogue sequences, which are really more like duelling
monologues. The people in this film feel the need to defend themselves
verbally as well as physically; when an enemy is down and helpless,
that's the best time for a declamatory speech at his or her expense.
I realize that makes Vol.
2 sound leaden, but nothing could be further from the truth.
As always in Tarantino's work, character bubbles up from the
streams of words. When our wrathful heroine the Bride (Uma Thurman)
finally tracks down her nemesis Bill (David Carradine), he favors
her with a sprawling theory about superheroes and their secret
identities. It's pure Quentin, but it also tells us about Bill
and his esteem for the Bride. Bill's ne'er-do-well brother Budd
(Michael Madsen) gets the drop on the Bride at one point and
prolongs her agony with his own chatter, and later on another
assassin, Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), will do the same to him.
The defining Tarantino moment concerns the victim who isn't just
killed but is forced to listen, like the unfortunate cop
in Reservoir
Dogs or the doomed Brett in Pulp
Fiction.
Both wit and dread gather around
these long exchanges, with sadism and violence never far from
the surface. Should Tarantino ever want to make an all-out horror
movie, he proves himself capable in a near-unbearable sequence,
played mostly in pitch black, in which the Bride is buried alive;
for what seems like an eternity, all we get from the darkness
is the Bride's terrified gasping and the thunder of dirt being
dumped onto her coffin. A close-quarters fight between the Bride
and Elle is tremendously vicious, the polar opposite of the elegant
spatial harmony of the face-off between the Bride and O-Ren Ishii
in the first installment. Though Vol. 2's body count is
of necessity smaller than that of its predecessor, the brutality
hurts more here, and counts for more.
We get a peek at the Bride's
earlier life with Bill, her mentor and lover; we see her training
under "the cruel tutelage of Pai Mei" (Gordon Liu),
an ancient Chinese master with flowing white hair, beard, and
eyebrows. (This character, like Vol. 1's swordmaker Hattori
Hanzo, is cheerfully stolen from existing Asian cinema.) David
Carradine ambles into the film, carrying a flute and years of
associations with martial arts and B-movies. Tarantino obviously
worships him, and Carradine rewards him with a portrait of a
callous man driven to destroy the one person who broke through
his armor. What Carradine brings to Bill, which isn't necessarily
scripted, is a becalmed sense of honor. We look at Bill and,
despite what he's done, we never think "evil"; he's
something else, something larger and harder to pin down, like
Hannibal Lecter.
Uma Thurman's performance,
too, acquires shadings in this second half. The Bride's pregnancy,
her grief and rage at losing her baby, cease to be exploitation
plot points and become the basis for a person. There's an interesting
little anecdote in which the Bride, having just taken the home
pregnancy test, has a run-in with a female assassin, and what
follows is just weird enough to be plausible. Mercy is possible
here, if not redemption; murderers remain murderers, and even
when Budd or Elle express pangs of regret, it doesn't mean they're
not who they are. What separates the Bride from the rest of the
pack of killers? Well, she chose to nurture life over death.
The point is less political than mythical: it's the priestess
of violence learning that her body can create as well as destroy.
In total, the Kill Bill movies expand the story far beyond
grindhouse-cinema homage. Vol. 1 was energetic fun, but
Vol. 2, in its digressions and philosophizing, actually
has the payoff.
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