Kill Bill: Vol. 2

Just as Kill Bill: Vol. 1 closed with a reflective moment that pointed the way to its sequel, so too does Vol. 2 begin with a moment of self-reflexive peevishness to link it to its predecessor: The Bride drives in a car against a background that is clearly a rear-projection effect and speaks directly to the camera in a camp monologue that essentially proves that Tarantino can't even get to his film's title without a speech of some sort.


From there, however, Vol. 2 becomes a different beast entirely from its wacky sibling. It begins properly on the same segment that opened Vol. 1 and provides the full backstory of The Bride's near-death at the hands of her former colleagues. It's a brilliant vignette that shows a pregnant Bride rehearsing her wedding in a quaint chapel in Texas, with a gentle build-up from a nice but somewhat condescending reverend to Samuel L. Jackson's contractually guaranteed appearance in every QT film. The Bride goes outside for some fresh air and finds...Bill (David Carradine ) She doesn't seem frightened, and Bill, with his long hair and pipe flute, hardly looks intimidating. They hold a civil, even pleasant, conversation, Bill asking her why she's giving up her old life and The Bride describing how she's found happiness in this simpler life. Bill comes inside with her and she, in a misguided attempt to avoid trouble, introduces her former lover as her father. Tommy, the fiancé , asks "Dad" to give The Bride away, and immediately the scene takes a turn. Bill's tone of voice drops just enough to let us know that something's gone horribly wrong, and Tarantino pulls the camera outside the chapel in time to see the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad arrive with machine guns.

With this severe and tense opening, Tarantino balances the the pronounced Asian influence of the first film with a spaghetti western feel. Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is dusty, arid and punishing where Vol. 1 was sleek and raffish. In fact, Vol. 2's more campy moments directly involve martial arts segments, while the humor elsewhere is as dry as the desert where much of the film's action occurs. Tarantino moves from that chilling opening scene to the present, with Bill driving to a mobile home in the middle of the desert to meet with his brother Budd (Michael Madsen ), a broken-down sad-sack who works as a bouncer at a local strip club that is so empty his only task is to clean the flood-prone ladies' bathroom. The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad members we've heretofore seen had all found a certain contentment in their "retirements": Green lived the domestic life while O-Ren fought her way to the top of Japan's criminal underworld. But Budd's story has an air of tragedy, or at least would if he had any redeeming qualities. Bill hasn't spoken to his brother in years, and Budd says that he pawned his Hattori Hanzŏ sword when asked if he kept up his swordsmanship. We learn later that this is a lie, signifying two things: Budd, ragged and defeated as he is, has a fundamental threshold of dignity, and he knows that telling his brother he sold his sword signifies that their relationship is beyond repair. At last, the Tarantino gift for character re-emerges.

The influence of Westerns has of course been evident through both films primarily in the omission of The Bride's true name, going so far as to censor any spoken reference to it in Vol. 1. Tarantino slyly plays up the mystery of the (Wo)Man with No Name conceit, and by dumping the reveal of her identity -- Beatrix Kiddo -- in the middle of the film in an amusing aside, he cheekily subverts the idea that withholding a character's name makes him or her more dangerous. There are also a handful of shots that could sneak their way into a pantheon of great Western shots, such as a dissolve from a shot of the sun with perfect lens flaring into a slowly focusing profile of Beatrix, dirty and battered, shuffling her way through the desert looking sun-dried and weak but wired with pure rage, the fading sun surrounding her head like a terrifying halo.


Kill Bill in its entirety is, naturally, a personal film, given that it concerns a woman seeking her own brand of justice for crimes committed against her, but Vol. 2 feels that much more intimate. She's literally boxed-in when Budd springs a trap and buries her alive, and she reminisces about her time with cruel martial arts master Pei Mei (Gordon Liu, who also played the leader of the Crazy 88 in the last film), who pushes a younger, undisciplined Beatrix to the breaking point where up to now she was a formidable warrior. Tarantino reflects the constricted mood by constantly framing his characters inside the shot: as Beatrix sneaks into Budd's mobile home, he hears a noise and comes to the trailer's small window to scan the area. Pei Mei can punch through wood only inches away, each blow opening a new window, and a later flashback involving Beatrix realizing she's pregnant and being attack by a rival assassin group ends with the sent killer framed in a hole made by a shotgun blast before leaving.


Even the enemies have a closer connection to Kiddo. Vernita shared a mutual professional respect with Beatrix and O-Ren was likely friends with The Bride, but Budd is the brother of the lover who wronged her, while Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) is the perfect foil for Beatrix. Like Thurman, Hannah is a tall, intimidating blonde , but Elle is a sadist where Beatrix has some level of humanity. The two women clearly hate each other, but they also share a begrudging respect for one another, and Beatrix brings out the only sense of honor in Elle: Driver poisoned Pai Mei for plucking our her eyeball for insolence and she hides a black mamba in a suitcase of money to kill Budd. She does this because she cannot stomach the idea of Beatrix, "the finest woman [she] ever met," dying in such a shameful manner at the hands of an oaf. (Blade Runner fans will also get a kick out of Elle's demise, as Hannah's wild thrashing matches her death scene in that film).

Shifting the focus from the blank desire for revenge onto the genuine characteristics and humanity of Beatrix requires Thurman to stretch out a bit from simply looking gorgeous and deadly, but she rises to the task with gusto. When she finally reaches Bill and finds her daughter whom she thought dead, Tarantino exhibits the most emotion he's ever allowed to be shown in one of his films as Thurman's doe eyes fight back tears. This scene, which opens the final bit of the saga, sets the stage for a serious rumination on revenge and violence.

In the scene preceding Kiddo's reunion with Bill and B.B., Beatrix visits an old Mexican pimp in a border town who knows Bill's whereabouts. More important that Bill's location, though, is what we learn about him through this man: as Beatrix notes in her narration, a young, fatherless Bill did what all fatherless children did and sought father figures. This pimp runs the border town with a militia of his whores' bastard children and mutilates the face of any prostitute who steps out of line, but he used to take Bill to the movies, where the little kid developed his first crush on Lana Turner that shaped his obsession with blondes. If Vihalo represents the sort of men who shaped Bill's youth, it's no wonder he grew up to be an insane, possessive killer. Indeed, he seems to have passed his sociopathy onto B.B., who watches bloody samurai films alongside her educational cartoons and admits to taking her goldfish out its bowl and watching it flop around before stepping on it. But she also contains some of Beatrix's morality, confessing that, after she killed the fish, she felt remorse for the first time.

B.B.'s presence in the film shows how the cycle repeats itself: Bill, in a brilliant speech comparing Beatrix and her desire for normalcy to Superman and his alter-ego (his real costume according to Bill), reveals his knowledge of Beatrix's psyche, and he knows that she enjoyed the thrill of killing even if he didn't force the answers out of her with truth serum. While Kiddo will offer love and support for B.B., she's so fundamentally outside of typical social norms that the child will be at least partially shaped by her mother's bloodlust. Furthermore, Tarantino's recent announcement of a planned third (and possibly fourth) volume concerning the desire for those left alive but wounded in some way by Beatrix seeking revenge and a fourth presumably focusing upon B.B.'s reaction to Vol. 3's outcome demonstrates how Tarantino is setting the child up to help continue the cycle of violence and vengeance and its all-consuming nature, a theme he revisited with Inglourious Basterds.

The end of the film, featuring Beatrix locked in a bathroom crying until her sobs turn into laughter, reminds me of the last shot of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, in which De Niro's character, aged and alone, crawls fatalistically into a bed in an opium den and the film freezes on his peculiar facial expression, his drug-induced smile potentially a sign of inner contentment following a preceding flashback or a haunting reflection of that flashback's insincerity and manufactured comfort aided by the opium. Beatrix cries for Bill, whom she still loves in some way, but she laughs because she won and reclaimed her daughter. But in that laugh is a hint of madness, an indication that she will never find normalcy in life and that she and B.B. are in for a potentially rough ride ahead. For the moment, however,Tarantino is content to give Kiddo her moment.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill is a two-part "movie-movie" that tells one story yet begs to be considered separately of its two films, not simply because the they project largely different moods but because each is such an orgiastic display of obscure film knowledge that even a reviewer who largely does not recognize and identify the majority of the references to Western and Eastern cinema outside of broad genre familiarity (such as this reviewer) cannot hope to contain the films' sheer sense of mimetic revelry in one review.

Of the two, Vol. 1 is the more audacious: who else but Tarantino would dare to open his film with a stark black-and-white shot of a pregnant woman begging for her life, then jump from that scene and the somber opening credits to a brightly lit, dazzlingly quaint suburb where two hot chicks engage in a kung fu fight straight out of an exploitation movie? Yes, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is a film that announces that it's style over substance from the start, one built on a story of vengeance that affords more emotional weight to a samurai sword than the plight of its wronged heroine (in this installment at least).


The style, though speaks for itself. Vol. 1 is, quite possibly, the most immaculately composed action movie since Kurosawa's Yojimbo or High and Low. Even as someone whose understanding of visual composition extends only so far as a loose grasp on the rule of thirds (which this film helped me learn), I stand mesmerized by Tarantino's acuity.

Good thing, too, as it keeps me from focusing too deeply on the plot. Tarantino, of course, tells the story out of order, so we meet The Bride (Uma Thurman) when she's beaten to a pulp and awaiting the worst. She only has time to tell her tormentor, "Bill, it's your baby" before she's shot in the head and sent into a coma. Then we leap four years into the future as she tracks down one of the people of her old squad of assassins who betrayed her. The woman, Jeannie Bell a.k.a.Vernita Green a.k.a. "Copperhead" (Vivica A. Fox), a colleague in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, is not the first name on The Bride's list, we later learn, and Tarantino eventually doubles back to cover that as well.

Where the non-linear storytelling of Pulp Fiction added a degree of excitement to its freewheeling joy, the temporal distortion of Kill Bill is more an affectation, a holdover from the writer-director's apparent need to live by Jean-Luc Godard's maxim, "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end...but not necessarily in that order." Vol. 1's structure exists, it would seem, to ensure that the final, more outlandish, fight occurs at the end of the film rather than its chronologically appropriate time before the shorter duel between Copperhead and The Bride (once code-named "Black Mamba"). Couldn't Tarantino have simply written the film so the less epic fight came first? Well, perhaps not, as Vol. 2 shows the fights growing increasingly anticlimactic (more on that later).

Of course, if the film's temporal structure is nothing more than an affectation, it certainly doesn't stand out against the rest of the film. One can defend his Death Proof primarily on the grounds that "it's supposed to be cheesy and dull," an argument built on sand but largely true, as Tarantino is so loyal to his beloved B-movies that he would design a film to deliberately ape their banal segments as well as their exciting ones. You see the first traces of it here, though Vol. 1 is anything but boring: after adding his own voice to Elmore Leonard's work in adapting Rum Punch into Jackie Brown, Tarantino here filters his unique voice through the sieves of Chinese wuxia and Japanese yakuza flicks, jidai-geki and kung fu; thus, characters spit out hilariously stilted dialogue focused solely on warrior codes of honor, vengeance and purity: ex-Viper O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), a half-Japanese half-Chinese woman born and raised on an American military base, climbs to the top of the Yakuza power ladder, she only expresses rage when one chauvinistic, xenophobic lieutenant decries her mixed blood ("expresses rage" might be too soft a phrasing to communicate the severing of a head).


For those who wish to catalog the specific spoken and visual references, godspeed. Vol. 1 takes Pulp Fiction and snorts Vincent's prime heroin, resulting in a bloody, foaming frenzy of film quotation. The most obvious form of genre reverence is easily witnessed in the casting of Sonny Chiba, king of the Japanese martial arts films, as Muramasa-esque master bladesmith Hattori Hanzŏ, a character itself named for the real-life ninja Chiba played in Shadow Warriors. The plot itself, of a woman exacting revenge for the death of her family, comes from a 1973 Japanese film Lady Snowblood. Those with time to kill might enjoy perusing an unofficial list of the various films and television shows references and marveling at the obscurity of some of his choices.

This mimetic orgy more or less allows Tarantino to get away with murder. Critics have accused the director of glorifying violence from the on-set of his career, but Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown largely alluded to the violence. Even the infamous ear scene in Dogs was blocked from our view by the assailant. Tarantino's movies, including his recent Basterds, create the illusion of gratuitous violence by teasing out situations with suspense that is practically, well, not Hitchcockian, as it relies on strength of character; where Hitch drew us in with the ominous threat of some device, Tarantino uses his loquaciousness to make us give a damn about these characters and to hang on every threatening word. When violence at last erupts, it's brief and brutal, occasionally funny in a gallows way but even in those situations carrying an undercurrent of vicious finality.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 doesn't much give a damn about that; after suffering the abuses of misrepresenting critics for years, he finally decided to become what they'd always cast him as and absolutely let loose.Tarantino takes the so-called "blood explosion" from the end of Kurosawa's Sanjuro and uses it for every severed appendage -- and oh boy are there a lot of them. Refusing to use CGI, QT uses the wire works that made a return to prominence with the Matrix films and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but for all the skill of the choreography, the violence is decidedly campy. People fly through the air after receiving a normal punch or lose arms in comedic fashions; Vol. 1 presents all the violence Tarantino supposedly injected into all of his films, but it's so absurd that the swifter kills of his other films maintain a severity and an unsettling feeling where this is just the hyperviolent equivalent of a sugar rush. Even in a film as unsubtle and meaningless as this, Tarantino's sly enough to make the film's animated segment its least cartoonish part.


The House of Blue Leaves showdown in particular stands as a hallmark of contemporary action sequencing even if it's all one big joke. The prolonged fight with the Crazy 88 is a madcap free-for-all as wildly visceral and unhinged as it is meticulously crafted. Before the fight breaks out, Tarantino's camera roams the restaurant as if searching for the action, but in his Scorsesian tracking shots he builds a mood of tension simply by breaking from The Bride's POV for a few minutes. In Uma Thurman's tall, powerful presence we feel safe, but Tarantino turns the patrons and employees of the restaurant all into devices because by following them we assume that they will soon prove important. The actual fight is an exercise in formalism, using flawless editing, framing and mise-en-scène all while keeping our attention rooted in the action of the characters and not those behind the camera. Supposedly, the proposed conjoined version of the two films, dubbed "The Whole Bloody Affair," reinserts all the censored footage and plays in color (I guess the decision to film most of it in monochrome allowed it to pass the MPAA board, which for any other body would be the stupidest thing you could imagine them demanding but for them is something more akin to a typical Tuesday). Having seen the color version, which appeared in the Japanese release, I have to confess a certain fondness for the high contrast black-and-white that gives the OTT bloodbath a certain elegance.

Yet while that sequence works and works brilliantly, aspects of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 are trapped in the director's movie-movie euphoria. As with Spielberg and the Indiana Jones films, Tarantino is so loyal to the B-movies that inform his project that he also ports over some of the unfortunate racism of those movies; in one extraneous scene, a Japanese man with the most hideous fake buck teeth since Mickey Rooney offended his way into our hearts in Breakfast at Tiffany's accosts O-Ren's psychotic 17-year-old bodyguard Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama). Furthermore, the music selection, normally a Tarantino staple, is the weakest of his career. It's not that the music is bad, and indeed its broad sampling of the Green Hornet and Twisted Nerve themes along with contributions from the RZA, Japanese guitarist Tomoyasu Hotei, all-gal garage rock band The 5.6.7.8's and more is perfectly appropriate for a film that exists on the strength of its odd references. But where the music of his other films helps not only to create a world but invite the audience into it, here it's simply another part of the referencing.

Still, the worst thing I can say about Vol. 1 is that, compared to Tarantino's more substantive use of references and violence, it is merely a "fun" movie, an bizarre charge to level against a film and even more useless when you consider how absurdly enjoyable the film is. In The Bride we find the greatest example of a female character kicking butt with a blatantly phallic weapon since Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And there is some depth when we reach the end, when The Bride emerges from her slaughter to face O-Ren and, without ever making it explicitly clear, the director lets us know that the two assassins used to be friends. Tarantino's non-linear structure finds its relevancy here, as we see the first emotional consequence of The Bride's quest for vengeance, followed by a reminiscence of The Bride's time with Hanzŏ, where he gives her his final sword with a warning: "Revenge is never a straight line. It's a forest. And like a forest it's easy to lose your way, to get lost, to forget where you came in." With this line, juxtaposed harshly against the cartoony glee of the preceding bloodbath, Tarantino sets the stage for a more mature rumination on the theme of revenge, one that he would explore not only in the film's next chapter but in his most recent opus.