To Kill is to Love. Review on Kill Bill Vol 2 Movie

Where Kill Bill: Volume 1 ended with a dizzying bang, a clandestine revelation and an uncertain future, Quentin Tarantino?s Kill Bill: Volume 2 finalizes on a disparate note, obviously more conclusive, and initially alarming but warming and appropriate all the same.

Similarly divergent in tone, the second volume adopts the uncelebrated half of revenge, by essentially not reveling in violence or gore but the effects of that violence, the consequential loneliness or hollowness. It?s obviously another genre-film stew, directly drawing from seventies chop-socky, Howard Hawks elements, and his own brand of ironic situational violence finding itself in the Spaghetti Western, however, there is a nearly equaled result of satisfaction in-step with the transcendence of Volume 1. Tarantino continually and rather restlessly demonstrates his exhibitionist capacity for the genre-film with its requisites and subtext, as well as a unique aptitude for the synthesis of his own legends, existing ones, and their extensive interlinked mythologies, making him less the proposed burglar than a mad re-inventor.

Kill Bill: Volume 2 abandons much of the festive splatter tonality of Volume 1 for an elegy on the reality of murder, the loss of experience, the aberrance of lifetime professionalism, and the sanctity of motherhood and pregnancy in relation to violence. Naturally, it continues to maintain an artful vision of intrepid vengeance as through a marsh of bloody and often humorous predicaments, but after the puckish gore in Volume 1, a softer, curiously estrogenic Tarantino surfaces quite slightly and surely.

In fact, the film arrives in a time when (rather fraudulent) counterpart rock-star-director Kevin Smith meets his eventual accumulation of comic intellectual hubris and alleged sentimental maturation in his mostly abominable Jersey Girl, in an event where ironically both directors explore ideas of parental responsibility and shattered previous lives. Because both films have their degrees of unusual sentimental twinges, one might be perplexed as to the lessening of their individual strengths, however, the difference is that Smith?s fall demonstrates the watery shamelessness of auteur pretension, whilst Tarantino?s genuinely audacious proclamations continue to ring true.

As you learned in Volume 1, the Bride (Uma Thurman) was shot down in a Texas wedding chapel along with her Groom (Chris Nelson), and other participants, by her former colleagues of The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and their leader Bill (David Carradine). After exterminating her attempted assassins, O-Ren Ishi (Lucy Liu) who became the Tokyo underworld?s head Yakuza boss, and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) who became a house wife, the Bride goes after Bill?s brother, Budd (Michael Madsen) who now lives in a trailer and works as an empty dive?s bouncer.

The final Bill-myrmidon, Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), soon crosses the determined path scheming with Budd, whilst the legend of Pai Mei (Gordon Liu) and his sponsorship of the Bride is told. The path to her desired revenge then becomes, as narration suggests, a forestry of convolution when the realization of her daughter comes to light.

Sans the frenetic creativity of anime and the crowd-pleasing precision of grandiloquent violent sprees, Kill Bill: Volume 2 is still rendered with the same methodical care for music selection (with contributions by The RZA, and some from pal Robert Rodriguez), lighting and tableau composition (expertly continued by Robert Richardson). Here, also, Tarantino?s keen manipulation of palaver and eloquent dialogue is mastered with the maturity endlessly hinted at throughout the piece?s expert constructs. Like his past work, the dialogue is propelled by the thoughts and ideas of characters to discover one another through observation (something Smith might have been able to do at one time: Chasing Amy) in expounding flourishes of truths and self-awareness.

A foray into gender role evolution and the psychology of sadism and masochism become filling and poetic tapestry to a pedantic cinematic creation. With elevated comic book art in the high camp forum, it presents the ancient association between carnality, love and violence in a superior wizardry, cunningly utilizing motifs, and describing then the decline of that primordial connection.

Surely, the jests in Volume 2 are effective and lasting, probably more so than those of Volume 1 but the ultimate impact of the installment is in its perceptiveness and bold alacrity to explore the double-edge sword of revenge, and of which attests to Tarantino?s authenticity. Through the brazen guise of a crooked Western pastiche saturated in Latin overtones and 1970s kung fu epics dressed in samurai outfits, the film drips with morose observations of existential considerations, remnants of lost time, the inevitability of dishonor, the aged swindler, the heartache and horrors of a deadly business, and the preservation of innocence. With an incredible idiosyncratic fashion it discovers a sorrow core at the heart of sadism and the tenderness of coldheartedness, agreeing that they?re buried but reachable all the same.

The philosophical cognizance of Eastern traditions and the pop art of Western culture once again ascribes the film, like its predecessor, a graceful and measured fusion. Like most great films of late it speaks to a unifying theme of West colliding with East, the idea braying with pandemonium but more so an apparent cohesion. Tarantino?s obsessive cinephile quality to encompass everything he admires is suspect to a deceptive naivete in nature but his sheer excitement and understanding of his obsession makes for something substantively stylish and genuinely pleasing in a way we used to know.

(94/100)