Kill Bill: Volume II (Quentin Tarantino, 2004)
When I reviewed the first part of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, I concluded with a rhetorical question: would anyone have enjoyed just the first half of Once Upon a Time in the West? My point was that it was difficult to assess Volume 1 prior to the release of Volume 2, since it was bound to end up as an empty exercise in style if it could never reach any conclusion. Sergio Leone’s classic sprung to mind as an example of a perfectly rounded film by a master of film technique that wouldn’t amount to anything if you showed just part of it. Having seen Volume 2 of Kill Bill, however, I can see that the example was all wrong. Once Upon a Time in the West is a film with purity of purpose that stands as a supremely executed single entity. Kill Bill, by contrast, makes perfect sense as two movies. Not only is each volume an anthology, constructed out of a series of episodes that add up to a larger whole, but each volume is starkly different in overall purpose and tone. I’m now convinced Tarantino intended for the film to be split in half all along, and I’m not one of those who hankers for Tarantino’s promised single movie version (I can see it being schizophrenic and unsatisfying, like From Dusk Till Dawn).
Volume 1 was the basic revenge fantasy, working up to the fight against O-Ren Ishii’s Crazy 88 Killers (which, chronologically, was actually the first of The Bride’s confrontations). Bill himself remained an enigma, kept offscreen to add to his mystique, and the other members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad were depicted simply as different incarnations of pure evil: their varied personalities were individualised through costume, much as villains in comic books are. Here, however, there are shades of grey and a depth of characterisation only hinted at before. The treatment of Bill himself signals the difference in approach. Instead of simply functioning as an offscreen menacing voice – like Blofeld in the early Bond films – he is introduced early on and remains front and centre throughout. The focus is therefore much more on the relationship between him and Uma Thurman’s Bride. While it would be wrong to say that Bill is redeemed in this film, he is certainly humanised. David Carradine apparently took the role after Warren Beatty turned it down, but it’s hard to imagine Beatty being as good. Bill alternates silky charm and menace, a standard formula for villainy, but Tarantino and Carradine make him fully rounded and almost likeable. You can simultaneously see why The Bride fell for him, and why she must escape his world. Tarantino’s other films are full of male characters who believe they are invulnerable, and he usually makes a point of stripping away their defences to show the bluff behind the swagger. As Tarantino has said, however, Kill Bill takes place not in the recognisably “real” world of his other films, but rather in a fantastic, imaginary “movie world.” In such a world, Bill really can be the super cool, ready-for-anything master of the martial arts that Tarantino’s other characters aspire to be. This might make him less interesting, but instead Bill is a convincing portrait of how such impossible coolness might warp one’s personality. Bill’s skills give him an almost narcissistic self-regard, and a psychotic edge: people only matter to the extent that they affect him. His intellect gives him a moral flipness that reminded me of Harry Lime in The Third Man, in that the strength of his rationalisations for his own behaviour buttresses him from conventional morality. Bill is possibly the best character Tarantino has created, and Carradine owns the screen every second he is on it.
Uma Thurman’s Bride is enlarged correspondingly, giving her ultimate confrontation with Bill real weight. I liked Thurman in Volume 1, but she didn’t show much range: my admiration was for pulling off a highly physical, gutsy female action role in the Ellen Ripley / Sarah Connor tradition. Here, though, we see other sides to the Bride, most notably in flashback scenes that show early stages in her relationship with Bill. In these scenes she’s so impressionable and obviously in thrall to Bill that it explains everything you need to know about how she became an assassin. Ultimately, she must use the strength and skills that Bill gave her to break free of him, and the scenes in which she does so are a satisfying finale to the film. Volume 1 concluded with an apparently insurmountable physical confrontation but here there is hardly any fighting. Instead, the climax comes as The Bride gets an unhindered opportunity to Kill Bill, only to find that she has unfinished business with him. The conclusion to the Bride’s journey is more moving than you expect because the character is realer than you expect. Tarantino hasn’t relaxed into the shallowness of his material as I feared he would (and as I thought he had in Volume 1). Instead, he’s deepened it, and made his comic book / spaghetti western / kung fu / samurai / exploitation / revenge hybrid into much more than an exercise in style.
Which is more than enough, because even more than Volume 1 this works very well at that shallow level. Tarantino’s dialogue is as good as ever, with Bill’s sharp monologue on Superman particularly funny and penetrating. Probably the most purely entertaining sequence, however, is the flashback to The Bride’s training at the hands of the sadistic martial arts master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu). Liu – who also played one of the Crazy 88s in Volume 1 – has a lot of fun with the highly caricatured character, and Tarantino’s direction here is spot-on. He uses a grainy film stock and lots of quick zooms, and the sequence perfectly captures the feel of dodgy 70s martial-arts films. Throughout the film, what struck me again about Tarantino’s directing style was its confidence. Much of the film is shot in a fluid but relatively unobtrusive style, but when he does break out into more eccentric techniques he knows exactly what he’s doing. At various points in Volume 2 he uses devices such as split screen and altered aspect ratios, and in lesser hands these would seem gimmicky and obtrusive. With Tarantino, however, they are always cleverly and judiciously applied, clearly motivated by the on-screen action.
Tarantino still has many critics, and Volume 1 of Kill Bill galvanised them after the subdued and mature Jackie Brown had left them with little to pick on. Sometimes they seem either to be reviewing the person himself (Tarantino, with his woody woodpecker laugh and geeky over-enthusiasm, does come across foolishly in interviews), or the less intelligent work that others did in imitation of him. In Kill Bill, the chief criticism is that old standby, self-indulgence. This charge is always selectively applied, since it is potentially applicable to any big budget movie. How do such critics draw the line between the acceptable self-indulgence of spending millions of dollars and employing hundreds of people to realise a personal vision, and the apparently outrageous self-indulgence of a few lengthy tracking shots and extended dialogue scenes? In an era where some critics like to complain about shortened attention spans and slick but empty Hollywood entertainments, it’s ironic that Tarantino’s willingness to dig deeper and take some time with his story is so widely criticised. With Kill Bill Tarantino once again shows why he deserves more than the stereotypes thrown at him.
His next film is reportedly to be a Dirty Dozen-style war film called Inglorious Bastards. It sounds unpromising: who’s up for a movie-pastiche war movie with real war all to prominent on the nightly news? But then again, I doubted him on Kill Bill, and I think it will be looked back on as a classic.