After a six-year hiatus, Quentin Tarantino returned to cinema screens last October with “Kill Bill Volume One,” a chop-happy kung-fu extravaganza with a stronger sense of style than any other film released in 2003. Tarantino’s film was garish, gaudy, and self-awarely hyperbolic. It was smart and bold, a work of feverish exuberance and enormous craft, a deeply felt bloody valentine from Tarantino to the exploitation influences of his 70s childhood.
The story was simple: a nameless Bride (a fierce Uma Thurman) awakens from a coma and seeks revenge on the assassins who killed her baby, turned her wedding into a bloodbath, and tried but failed to plant her six feet under.
Heads rolled, arteries exploded and audiences loved every minute. The film surged forward with steamroller momentum to a frenzied final battle with gore enough for 10 “Living Dead” movies and ended with a zinger of a cliffhanger that hooked audiences for another round of high-kicks and severed limbs. The action would get even zanier, the stakes would get higher, and the globetrotting Bride would get closer and closer to her deadly destination. “Volume Two” would be even better than “Volume One.”
Right?
Wrong. Sometimes great expectations are a curse.
As a single four-hour-long grindhouse epic, “Kill Bill” would have been a masterpiece, a manic merger of pop and arthouse sensibilities with a little something for every nerd in the world to covet and over-fetishize. Splitting the film in half has stripped the pathos from “Volume One” and emasculated the bloodletting in “Volume Two.” The first installment is still a miraculous spectacle of swords and splatter, but it promises mayhem and closure that the second film does not deliver.
“Volume Two” is slow, methodical and, unlike “Volume One,” measured in its excesses. Tarantino isn’t trying to top himself action-wise; he’s coolly and calmly following his saga’s potboiler plot to its inevitable conclusion.
This more mellow approach is both a blessing and a curse. The characters and performances in “Volume Two” manage to transcend caricature, and the script (co-written by Tarantino and Thurman under the smug moniker “Q&U”) expands and deepens its themes of revenge and redemption in unexpected if unsatisfying ways. The Bride is still on her “roaring rampage” of vengeance, setting her sights on the remaining members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad before she can ultimately, you guessed it, kill Bill.
First on the list is Bill’s brother Budd, played with hangdog reserve by Michael Madsen as a man full of regret and discarded ideals. Once one of the foremost contract killers on the planet, Budd’s the bouncer at a seedy Southwest strip club, lazing his lonely days away in a dust-covered trailer sipping on beers and listening to Johnny Cash records. He knows he’s marked for death and he doesn’t seem to mind; he accepts that he deserves whatever punishment he gets. It’s obvious from this early sub-plot that Tarantino has more on his mind this time out than slicing and dicing.
Tarantino seems hell-bent on adding dimension to the one-sided characters he introduced audiences to in “Volume One,” and his cast is largely up to the challenge. Madsen adds considerable depth to his underwritten supporting role, and Uma Thurman fleshes out the Bride’s quest for retribution with searing bursts of emotion that hint at the whimpering wounded victim buried inside her righteously roaring tigress.
But it’s David Carradine (as Bill) who really owns “Kill Bill Volume Two.” Bill is larger than life in a quiet, dangerous kind of way. His brand of evil is charming and seductive, and Carradine slithers through every frame with a hushed delivery and a glint of mischief in his eyes. Whether he’s serenading with a flute or extolling the virtues of “Superman” comic books, one senses that he’s always got his finger firmly on a hidden blade or trigger, ready to strike even his loved ones dead in a moment’s notice if they interfere with his modus operandi. If 2004’s a slow year, Carradine may get much-deserved Best Supporting Actor mentions at year’s end.
The director is trying to create his own mythology from the ground up, and Tarantino fumbles the ball by overitalicizing certain passages of the film for every ounce of camp and thematic resonance while other sections seem limp and uncultivated by comparison. There is little build to the Bride’s final confrontation with Bill, perhaps because the cliffhanger of “Volume One” blows a plot twist that should have been saved for “Volume Two.”
Because the audience knows something that the Bride doesn’t, there is no feeling of discovery or emotional upheaval when it finally happens. It’s a major misstep that makes much of the film’s climax seem cold and distant in a way unlike anything that has come before it. Also troubling is Tarantino’s meticulous care in tying together some plot threads while he seems unconcerned with the cohesiveness of others.
In both volumes of “Kill Bill,” though, God is less in the framework than in the details. This film, however disappointing it may be to rabid fans of the first installment, has enough wit, quirks and digressions to keep Tarantino enthusiasts at bay.
Budd’s storyline is a welcome tangent, as is a cheeky flashback to the Bride’s fight training under the “cruel tutelage” of Pei Mei, a nasty sage who lives in a mountain-top temple and has a hilarious way of whipping his long white beard to the side after his every prophetic line of crypto-speak.
Over the course of the film, characters are attacked by poisonous snakes, buried alive, and vanquished with Pei Mei’s sacred “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart” technique. There’s even a featherweight cameo from “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown” alumnus Samuel L. Jackson as a jaded church organ player who used to tour with Motown’s finest.
Extreme camera angles, whiplash zooms, black-and-white photography, and the usual eccentric soundtrack selections (one confrontation is underscored with a snippet of Ennio Morricone’s classic “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” score) are all on tap, but Tarantino seems to have spilled all his best tricks out of the bag in “Volume One,” making “Volume Two” a grandiose and overlong (nearly two and a half hours; the first film ran about 105 minutes) anticlimax.
The new film diminishes the impact of the first one instead of enhancing it. Not to say that “Volume Two” isn’t a good movie; on its own wacky terms, it is. Yet as a “sequel” to “Volume One,” it’s too mannered to capitalize on the zany go-for-broke adrenaline injected by its predecessor, disappointing more by association than by individual content.
Maybe someday Tarantino will release a cut of whole film, free of a seven-month intermission between halves and without the clunky padding needed to smooth out the transition. That film may be a masterpiece, but until this critic sees that version he can’t help but be disappointed that “Kill Bill Volume Two” is only good instead of great.