Originally posted 5/2/04
Kill Bill: Volume 2
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino, based on the character “The Bride” created by “Q + U”
Producer: Lawrence Bender
Stars: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Darryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, Gordon Liu
When the credits “Based on the character ‘The Bride’ by Q+U” flash in big bold letters over the end credits of the second half of Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti samurai splatter fest Kill Bill, one half expects a little heart with an arrow through it around the “Q+U”. Because once you look past the blood, dirt and sweat caked on The Bride (Uma Thurman) during her murderous kung-fu rampage of revenge, you realize that almost never in cinema history has an actress been shot more lovingly.
Tarantino’s camera is under the direction of Robert Richardson, an Academy Award-winner in his own right most well known for realizing Oliver Stone’s crazed visuals in The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, and many others. And this camera adores Uma Thurman, lavishes her, but not in the usual oily-shiny make-the-woman-look-like-a-pin-up way. Tarantino’s love is like the schoolboy who doesn’t know how to express that he likes the girl, so he puts spiders in her lunchbox. Take a second to look when you’re fully in the groove he’s laying down, when the movie’s at its best – you’ve never seen Uma look so beautiful.
This second part is better than the first, and one of the reasons why is that we finally get to see Bill (David Carradine) and learn a little more about the origin of The Bride (including her utterly fantastic real name), her training to be a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, how she got pregnant with Bill’s child and tried to leave him and his life of killing behind.
After a brief re-cap, she’s back on her mission, with three names left on her to-do list – the first two are Bill’s younger brother Budd (a rather zaftig Michael Madsen), and the one-eyed Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), who also trained with Bill and the Bride’s teacher, 1,000 year-old master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu). She had the misfortune to insult Pai Mei – hence the eyepatch.
And then there’s Bill himself, who dropped in on The Bride’s “wedding dress rehearsal” with the rest of the DiVAS one fateful day and laid waste to everyone – not to mention, made off with her daughter, born while she was in a coma. At the end of Vol. 1, we realized that The Bride doesn’t know about her yet.
There’s hardly a filmmaker working today with a wider pipe feeding his imagination directly onto the screen than Tarantino. That has its advantages and its disadvantages.
The advantage is that his cinematic alchemy is coherent, combining elements no one else would consider and somehow making them seem to belong together. The grainy photography and color palette during The Bride’s training (along with Pai Mei’s exaggerated gestures and extravagant overacting) are straight out of cheap chopsocky movies. Meanwhile, her travels through desert landscapes, with their extreme close-ups and sawdust ethereal music, are straight out of Sergio Leone (there are even a few vintage cuts of Ennio Morricone’s music on the eclectic soundtrack). Like no one else could (or would even think to), Tarantino makes that shotgun marriage work.
The disadvantage is, his skill at playing with timeframes in order to keep constant tension sometimes comes off as a cheat, a stopgap for him to indulge in his love affair with his words. One of the things Tarantino is best at is tipping you off that something terrifically violent is coming in the very near future, but you’re not sure what. You’re waiting for the cool. So long stretches of seemingly aimless dialogue, with languid coolest-person-in-the-room pauses, often become unbearably tense, because you’re itching for the payoff.
The problem is, in Kill Bill, everyone considers themselves the coolest person in the room. So everyone pauses, everyone tries to milk the too-arch verbiage to the maximum, and sometimes, on reflection, you realize that what you just spent so much time watching didn’t add up to all that much.
And as incisive and funny as the speech on the subject is, I have trouble believing Bill ever had much time to become so well-read in Superman comics. Just like Tarantino’s famous ghost-written stretches of Crimson Tide, which posited that rough-tough Navy Man Denzel Washington was also a Silver Surfer connoisseur, it’s a bald-faced stretch, and I think Tarantino lets himself get away with it because he’s convinced its too good not to set out to be worshipped. He’s almost right.
Sometimes these moments work in the final analysis because they allow us to get under the skin of the characters that little bit more. Between the excess of Tarantino and the paint-by-numbers characters of most studio fare these days, I’ll take the excess.
When the cool comes, it sure is something. The fight between The Bride and Elle in a rickety trailer home is as unforgettable as its flawless punchline. And when someone mentions a tantalizing bit of violence known as the “five-point palm exploding-heart technique”, you had better believe you will see it in action.
Enough can’t be said about Thurman as the anchor of all of this. Few enough actresses in the world could be called upon to keep a straight face through all this gouging, splintering, and serum-injecting, much less tug on the audience’s heartstrings during the unexpected emotional moments and perform martial arts as good as anything you saw in The Matrix. It’s a performance the likes of which we may never see again.
If Thurman is the schoolgirl with spiders in her lunchbox, with this performance, she spreads peanut butter on the spiders and eats them, and it knocks Tarantino head over heels. I can’t imagine two happier people than “Q+U”, making their movie together. That kind of joy is palpable, and what makes this movie a standout.