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Review by: Jack Foley | Rating:
Two
DVD SPECIAL FEATURES: Making of. Chingon performance
from the Kill Bill Volume 2 premiere; Damoe deleted scene.
IF KILL Bill: Volume One was
‘a straight-ahead, heart-pumping, sit on the edge of your
seat, ‘wow’-type of experience’, then Volume Two
marks the point at which things really get serious, when motives
become explained, and past sins are revisited.
Having dispensed with former colleagues, O-Ren Ishii and Vernita
Green, in spectacularly grandiose fashion, only Michael Madsen’s
Budd and Daryl Hannah’s Elle Driver stand in the way of The
Bride’s most prized victim, Bill - but you can bet her path
to bloody retribution is far from easy.
As director, Quentin Tarantino, himself, states: "Now it’s
easy to lose your way as far as The Bride’s journey is concerned.
Now we slow down a little bit, we get to know the characters,
and things aren’t one, two, three. Real life rears its ugly
head into her journey."
The result is another brilliantly realised piece of film-making,
a bravura masterpiece which revels in its ability to repulse and
delight, in equal measure, while marking a welcome return for
the trademark Tarantino dialogue and complex characterisations
that many found lacking from its adrenaline-fuelled predecessor.
Kill Bill: Volume 2 is, in short, a worthy conclusion to a superb
opening chapter, that will have movie buffs everywhere shrieking
with approval.
What’s more, it consistently manages to surprise, throwing
in plenty of plot twists along the way to The Bride’s inevitable
confrontation with Bill, and filling audiences with a foreboding
sense of dread at the thought of seeing just how sinister these
characters can become.
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Madsen’s washed-up Budd, for example, is a particularly
loathsome character, a killer-turned strip club bouncer, who views
his impending encounter with Uma Thurman’s Bride as an opportunity
to get rich once more.
His treatment of The Bride, at one stage of proceedings, is every
bit as merciless as the actor’s handling of a captured policeman
in his Mr Blonde/Reservoir
Dogs persona, yet he remains every bit as charismatic as that
villain, even if a little flabbier.
Hannah, too, builds on the promise she displayed, fleetingly,
in Volume One, more than justifying her description, by all who
know her, as ‘a heartless bitch’, and providing the
platform for a genuinely thrilling showdown with Thurman.
But it is David Carradine’s eponymous villain who remains
the most memorable, as the spurned love interest of Thurman’s
Bride, whose impudent reaction triggers far-reaching consequences
for himself, and his organisation.
His scenes with Thurman positively crackle with energy, while
their final moments together look destined to become part of movie
folklore.
Yet as violent as proceedings become, Volume Two has a heart
as well, which makes the stronger stuff easier to stomach, and
the ending all the more poignant. This is, at the end of the day,
a love story, it would seem, which is every bit as warped and
perverted as we have come to expect from Tarantino.
At two hours and 20 minutes, Kill Bill: Volume 2 could so easily
have fallen victim to the same sort of self-indulgent excess that
made Jackie Brown so tedious, yet it never puts a foot wrong,
with each chapter proving as memorable as the last, and packed
with classic moments.
And while the set piece fight scenes continue to exhilarate,
as they did in the first film, it is the verbal exchanges which
consistently make the biggest impression, embellishing his characters
with the cool rhetoric we have come to expect from a Tarantino
production.
This is, to coin a phrase from the film itself, the director
at his most roaring and rampaging, and bloody satisfaction is
all but guaranteed.
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