Ready to Rent Ready to Rent (August 27, 2004)

Kill Bill: Vol. 2

Miramax Home Video VHS & DVD

2 hrs 18 mins

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Vol. 2" commits the unforgivable sin of being what its predecessor certainly was not: boring. After the apocalyptic furor of "Vol. 1," with its inspired acrobatics, biblical pop sensibilities and kinetic energy that threatened to infect its blissful mayhem onto the audience, "Vol. 2" comes across as the surly older sibling that has crashed the party. It's as if Tarantino had thought that the mark of a "mature" filmmaker is to humanize the myth he had created in the first film for indulgent posterity, draining the life from the second film so to be taken for a serious filmmaker.

Not to say that "Vol. 2" does not, at certain points, reach the level of gleeful chaos that "Vol. 1" attained, but sadly, those moments are few. The film starts with a neat B&W retro ode to the film trailers of the '50s and '60s, with "The Bride" (Uma Thurman) speeding away against a projected roadster backdrop, explaining her exacting the "bloody revenge" of the first film and how she is working her way down the list to her ultimately killing Bill. What we settle into, however, is a very long intro, with a friendly wedding rehearsal confrontation that turns into a sadistic act of love.

What ensues is a series of short films, Tarantino's trademark, all with such an uneven eclectic tone that it seems the film falls under the weight of its own construction. My favorite bit is probably a classic example of Tarantino schtick. Bill's brother Bud, now a retired assassin, lives alone in the middle of the Great American Desert, a place that director Sergio Leone made a myth in his "Once Upon a Time in the West." Bud is the classic, self-deprecating loner, a clown with the soul of a killer who could have stepped from the pages of a Jim Thompson pulp fiction novel, and who has been warned that the Bride is on her way. Instead of preparing himself for potential doom, Bud decides to go to his regular job as a bouncer in a truck stop strip joint that is suspiciously devoid of any clientele. In proper Tarantino form, Bud is chewed out by his oily boss for being late and is suspended from his job one day at a time ("Look who's not working Wednesday! Oh! And Thursday, no, not Thursday either").

What "Vol. 2" lacks is a sense of fun about its material. Gone is the adult comic book stylings of "Vol. 1," which blended together so well with Tarantino's sense of Asian cinema and French New Wave coolness (all of which have influenced the other over the last 40 years). Leone and other Italian directors from the '60s have influenced "Vol. 2" to the point that maybe Tarantino should have stopped and asked himself whether or not those directors' films, full of ambiguous moralities and heavy handed symbolism, should have a place in this film. In order to humanize Thurman's bride, Tarantino has let in the Trojan Horse of pomposity, compromising the man-boy director's fascinating fantasies of revenge. -Joe Ramirez

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