Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 2 Scores Big Time! Bloodletting Lessens, But Kung-fu Moves Galore!

The story begins with The Bride, played to perfect pitch by Uma Thurman, racing along in a convertible with her Hattori Hanzo sword by her side. While roaring down a back road, the Bride, also known as Beatrix Kiddo, looks polished, resolute and sexy as she speaks directly into the camera and briefly brings us back up to speed on where we are in the story and where we're going, which is to find Bill and hunt him down like a dog and kill him.

Though The Bride manages to exact revenge directly and indirectly on at least as many of her former colleagues, the Deadly Viper Assasins (or DiVAs), in Kill Bill Vol. 2 as in Vol. 1, she does so this time without having to cut her way through 88 psychotic Japanese and Chinese assasins nor a handful of other disposable henchpersons and other human obstacles.

The swordfest that seemed to have left rivers of blood flowing off the silver screen as limbs flew, veins burst and heads rolled in Vol. 1 has been racheted down in the second part of Tarantino's tale of revenge. There's plenty of violence, but very little actual swordplay.

Nevertheless, the tension is intense. And Tarantino being Tarantino, we're never ever sure what's around the corner. Kill Bill Vol. 2 is as full of surprises as the first movie. Unlike its predecessor, which posed many unanswered questions, Vol. 2 is full of answers.

For one thing, we finally get to meet the much-talked-about and mysterious Bill. Portrayed by David Carradine, Bill is the leader of the DiVAs and is The Bride's former lover (as well as the father of her child). Bill is a veteran killer-warrior who comes across as a mythic East-West combination of philosophical kung-fu-cowboy, and ronin gunslinger for hire.

Carradine's performance is brilliant. Watching him on screen, we had to remind oursleves that this was the same Carradine ("Grasshopper") of the Kung-Fu TV series re-runs we used to watch as kids growing up in America. Carradine looks great for his age. His build is lean but he looks agile, and he's a very bad, mean-ass dude, the kind who might shoot you just for snorning too loudly. If he got himself a haircut and put on a Brookes Brothers suit, he might make one hell of a great CEO.

Without spoiling the story, suffice it to say that when Uma Thurman's Beatrix finally catches up with her prey, Bill recounts the chain of events that led him to a desert chapel some four-plus years earlier to put a bullet in The Bride's head and seek his own revenge.

Where Kill Bill Vol. 1 was part homage to the Japanese samurai movie tradition, as well as a heavy nod to Japan's post-war pop culture and cinema, Vol. 2 is homage to the classic Chinese kung-fu movie traditions and the traditional and spaghetti westerns (which, incidentally, are called macaroni westerns in Japan).

There's a lot of kung-fu in Kill Bill Vol. 2. The real star appearance in the movie is Gordon Liu as Pai Mei, an aged martial-arts master of the old-school Shaolin style. Liu is an icon and in Kill Bill he is a composite of various characters he's played for decades in a long line of Hong Kong martial-arts flicks, some obscure, some classic, including one of the genre's all-time greats, The 36th Chamber of the Shaolin (released in 1978 and in the United States as The Master Killer).

With his shock-white long hair, eyebrows as long and thick as hand-rolled Cuban cigars, and a long, stringy goatee (which he strokes religiously to much hilarious and symbolic effect), Pai Mei may look like he's ready to enter a managed-care program, but in reality he's as lethal a weapon as they come, capable of killing a man with a single hand-chop to the chest.

In an important backstory sequence in which The Bride recalls her brutal and intense training under Pai Mei (which Bill had arranged in the hopes of making her an even more efficient killing machine), Tarantino has pulled out almost all the stops in a series of kung-fu action scenes culled from old-school martial-arts movies. It would be worth seeing Kill Bill again if only for the Pai Mei-Gordon Liu segments alone--they're both funny and integral to the spirit of the film.

Whereas Vol. 1 had minimal plot underlying the amazing cinematographic panache and polish, the second installment of Kill Bill tells its story with greater depth and a thicker narrative thread.

Kill Bill Vol. 2 is not really a sequel in the major-studio, movie-franchise sense. Taken together, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 are more like a very long single movie divided neatly in two for the sake of audiences (and maybe maximum profit, too--the DVD for Vol. 1 was released a week ahead of the theatrical debut of its sequel and reportedly sold over two million copies.)

Both volumes of Kill Bill are filled with more pop-cultural references than the average moviegoer can probably catalog, of course, after Vol. 2 has milked its theatrical run for all it can, we'll see it on video store shelves fairly soon. We'll wait until then to see it again. But see it again we most certainly will.

--The Kid from Kyoto

RELATED LINKS

Official Kill Bill Website
Charles Taylor's Kill Bill Vol. 2 Film Review [Salon.com]
Charting the Tarantino Universe [NY Times]
Kung Fu CatfightsÑThe Bride Returns... [NY Observer]
Qunetin Tarantino Biography [IMDb]
Quentin Tarantino Filmography [IMDb]
A Band Apart Company Website
Tomohiro Machiyama's 2003 Quentin Tarantino Interview
Gordon Liu Biography & Filmography [KungFuCinema.com]