Kill Bill: Vol. 2

Released 2004
Stars Uma Thurman, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, David Carradine, Gordon Liu
Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. 2" is an exuberant celebration of moviemaking, coasting with heedless joy from one audacious chapter to another, working as irony, working as satire, working as drama, working as pure action. I liked it even more than "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" (2003). It's not a sequel but a continuation and completion, filmed at the same time; now that we know the whole story, the first part takes on another dimension. "Vol. 2" stand on its own, although it has deeper resonance if you've seen "Kill Bill," just released on video.

Of the original "Kill Bill," I wrote: "The movie is all storytelling and no story. The motivations have no psychological depth or resonance, but are simply plot markers. The characters consist of their characteristics." True, but one of the achievements of "Vol. 2" is that the story is filled in, the characters are developed, and they do begin to resonate, especially during the extraordinary final meeting between The Bride and Bill -- which consists not of nonstop action but of more hypnotic dialogue and ends in an event that is like a quiet, deadly punch line.

Put the two parts together, and Tarantino has made a masterful saga that celebrates the martial arts genre while kidding it, loving it, and transcending it. I confess I feared that "Vol. 2" would be like those sequels that lack the intensity of the original. But this is all one film, and now that we see it whole, it's greater than its two parts; Tarantino remains the most brilliantly oddball filmmaker of his generation, and this is one of the best films of the year.

Summary from Roger Ebert

I loved Volume 2, which is just what I expected from Volume 1. It has the dialogue and character development I expect from Tarantino, and I think it ranks right up there with the rest of his work. Volume 1 held me in awe with its style and technical mastery, but it horrified me with its content. Volume 2, on the other hand, thrilled me in its entirety. I think people will be split pretty severely on the two volumes, because they're so very different. Volume 1 centered around its violence, while Volume 2 centers around the threat of violence, and there actually ends up being very little violence to speak of.

Beatrix' single-minded quest for vengeance is the engine that drives the movie, and I thought it might change at the end when she learned Bill had so lovingly raised their daughter. I didn't know where it was going to go from this point because both people obviously still had feelings for each other, but there was no way to reconcile. How could two relentless, remorseless killers overcome each other's betrayal to trust each other again? I think if they had tried to do so, it would have been false. Instead, they resolved it the only way they could, but the surprise was in how quickly it happened. Volume 2 wasn't about epic battles. It was about its characters, and I loved it. --Bill Alward, August 15, 2004