The yellow outfit must be in the wash…
The thing I find amusing is that Kill Bill Volume 2 basically ignored 90% of the things that made the original Kill Bill so popular – and is all the better film for it.
Gone is the haphazard scheduling that saw the targets bumped off in random order, that is confined to a few flashbacks.There are no anime breaks, black and white bits or rampant use of split screen, there’s not even too much “how cool is this” self-conscious slo-mo stuff. What is left is reasonably well plotted and filled with B+ grade Tarantino dialogue, which is nothing to sneeze at by the way.
(He has been dining out on reputation for far too long, Death Proof and Inglorious Basterds both featured C and D grade Tarantino dialogue but no-one seems to care. As long as he writes it, it’s a pass.)
“Well I told you it would smudge if you didn’t sit still!”
We pick up the action early in the second half when the Bride finally meets Bill for the first time (onscreen). Bill is played by David Carradine, and looking at the leathery, weathered features and homeless guy hairdo, and then listening to his lispy monotonous ramblings and you’d think the Bride would be the one who’d need a belt to provide “physical motivation”.
And while I’m here, in KB2 we finally get to the bottom of why BLEEP’s name is bleeped in the first volume and for much of this film – and let me tell you it that as far as reveals go this was a total dud. Really, that’s what her name was? That was the surprise? That was worth waiting a couple of years?
Back to the film – KB1 had her topping the chicks, this one deals mainly with the guys, and by that I mean Bill, Bud… and Daryl Hannah. You’re telling me that isn’t a guy’s name!?!
Bud gets dealt with first, but not easily. In fact for someone who has torn through dozens of highly trained Yakuza henchmen and various other trained killers for the Bride to go out sniffing loam might have seemed an gargantuan anticlimax.
This is so much easier with an egg.
The Bride’s training with Pai Mei contained every cliché in the book, but as that is what Tarantino was going for, and the fact that the 25 minute scene justifies her escape from a premature burial – it gets a pass… barely.
The best scene in the movie is the chick-on-chick action with Bridey and Elle Driver, both going balls out in the confined space’s of the late Bud’s trailer. And after the hokey speech that Elle gives Bud about Black Mambas as he lays dying it’s fair to say she gets what’s coming to her – try and read some more facts from Wikipedia now bitch!
All this brings us to the last third of the film where the final showdown begins between the reverse Ashton and Demi couple. Bill fumbles slowly and deliberately through his lines like a drunk person who desperately wants to appear sober, worse than that he is also saddled with some of the crappier dialogue in the movie.
I’ve now seen KB2 a few times, and I remember the first time I watched it in the cinema the standoff between the pair being reasonably suspenseful and tense, now it is just 20+ minutes of “get on with it”. And don’t get me started with the 5 point palm exploding heart technique, there is hooky, there is memorable and cool, there is slightly silly, then daft – then comes the ridiculous 5 point palm exploding heart technique, that Tarantino got away with such a hackneyed plot device is amazing.
All said and done though Kill Bill Volume 2 has the best scenes out of the pair of movies, it has some of the best dialogue too. But it also has too much filler masquerading as “clever”, and far too many self indulgent speeches where they weren’t warranted. That stuff worked when Jules was telling Frank Whaley and his buddies the Righteous Men passage, I was less moved (at least in a positive way) during the Black Mamba banality.
Final Rating – 8 / 10. Don’t take me saying Kill Bill 1 and 2 are overrated as me hatin’, they are both solid films. But the universal acclaim and fawning was perhaps a little much for what are clearly B Movies with a little more bling.
