Kill Bill Volume 2

Another night without linky goodness, another feeble excuse about having been out at the cinema…

Having re-watched Kill Bill Volume 1 at the cinema the other week to refresh my memory, it was time to see what sort of a job Quentin Tarantino had made of concluding his story. As just about every review has noted, Kill Bill Volume 2 is stylistically very different to the first volume, drawing on spaghetti westerns more than eastern martial arts flicks. This time round the violence is mostly inflicted with hands, fists and head-butts rather than edged weapons, and the blood is a lot less fake-looking. Uma Thurman does a sterling job of making her bad girl plausible, Michael Madsen’s Budd proves to be a lot nastier than he looks, and Elle Driver, I’m delighted to say, amply demonstrates just what a nasty bitch she really is. And Bill … well, David Carradine comes very close to stealing the film from Uma Thurman. If I squint I can just about imagine Warren Beatty playing the part, as originally planned, but I can’t imagine him pulling off the silky smooth bastard Carradine gives us. There’s a fair bit of humour this time round, in between the bouts of violence and the various set-piece speeches Tarantino hands his characters. (This volume is a lot more like a ‘traditional’ Tarantino film, with no character so rushed that he can’t pause and speak eloquently and at length about why he’s doing what he’s doing and how he feels about what he’s done/is about to do. And obviously when I say “he” and “his” I could equally well say “she” and “her”: everyone’s at it this time round.)

What can I say to sum up? If you saw the first film, don’t go in expecting more of the same. But don’t assume that different means worse. Bringing some closure to the plot threads Tarantino set up in the first film automatically makes the concluding volume more satisfying emotionally, but it’s very difficult (particularly at this time of night, writing shortly after getting back from my trip to the cinema) to say which is better. Let’s just say both are tremendously entertaining if you have the stomach for the level of violence on display, and that I can’t wait to watch both volumes on DVD a few months from now and see how they play in quick succession.

(For what it’s worth, I’d be fascinated to see a Special Edition DVD showing us how Tarantino would have welded the two very different halves together to bring us the single three-hour film which was originally planned. I find it very hard to picture how that would have worked as well as the two stylistically distinct halves we’ve seen have. You have to give some credit to Tarantino and Miramax for doing what was right for the film, instead of creating what would surely have been a less satisfactory story for the sake of running time alone.)