Kill Bill: Vol. 2

Once again Quentin Tarantino delivers a killer cool over the top film that impresses. In Kill Bill: Vol. 2 Tarantino’s fourth film he shows us why he has had such an impact on film with s o few movies. Here he is distilling the spirit, and many of the major plot elements of many of the Japanese action swordplay films.

This follows the first Kill Bill but it lends much more depth to the story and the characters introduced in the first film. If the first film was a nonstop rollercoaster ride of fast swords and spurting blood, the second gives us background as to who these people are and why they all deserve to die.

As with most classic films it shows that life is not all black and white. The bride is by no means innocent. We find that she was an assassin and had a special relationship with Bill. We also learn that the elusive Bill, played to perfection by David Carradine of ‘Kung Fu’ fame, is by no means a faceless monster.

The bride continues to number three on her list, Budd, Bill’s brother. Budd is played beautifully by Michael Madsen as a down and out former assassin now working, occasionally, as a bouncer in a strip club and living in a trailer. He has no intention of running or hiding from the bride when warned by his brother. He sits in wait. And soon enough the bride comes. Budd gets the jump on her and ends up burying her alive. This is some of the best footage of the film. The silence, the darkness, and the dark and grainy image leave the audience feeling completely claustrophobic. It also gives up time for a flashback, which this film is full of, showing us who the bride is, some of her relationship with Bill, and the master Pai Mei, played by Chia Hui Liu, a veteran martial arts actor who appeared in many of the shaolin films. Here he is the bemused but difficult master who teaches the bride how to become the fighter that she can be. This use of back-story was missing in the first film but it leads to a greater appreciation of the actions of the first film. It also goes to show why this is not a sequel, this is the second part of the first movie, and from this point on one should not be watched without the other for balance and understanding.

Darryl Hannah as Elle Driver is the worst of the worst. She would manipulate those around her to get in with Bill and seems most trusted by him though she is the least trustworthy. The only one who has not directly left Bill’s service she seems to be his envoy to the world from preparing to kill the bride in her coma to cleaning up the lose ends in the desert. She is one of the few truly evil characters in the film and her punishment is truly gratifying. Her fight with the bride in the trailer is another tight action sequence with a lot of force crammed into a small space exploding in massive destruction.

And then there is Bill. The bride is reunited with Bill and the audience discovers that perhaps Bill is not the monster he was made out to be. Perhaps he is a jealous lover and a caring father. Does this make him less deserving of death by the bride’s hand? This is perhaps her final mission and it is carried out with true aplomb varying between wicked violence, comic surprises, and quiet contemplation. All of these make the killings of the previous film more ponderous and also more meaningful. We are so used to films with nonstop violence, but none delve into the how did this all get started and then conclude that, it doesn’t matter, as long as it ends here.

Again Tarantino combines his love for many of the B or even C films of the past and is able to turn them into an ultra-hip statement for a new generation of film goers. True his films are more about style than substance, but the style does shine, and sometimes the substance is not all that important anyway, it is the ride that matters. For general viewers these movies have been labeled for their terrible violence content. In this day and age I thought it gratifying that though the violence may be cartoonish, the characters are well developed in their motives for why we kill, sometime for fun, but mainly because there is no way to avoid it, especially if one is an assassin by trade.