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Quentin Tarantino Review Day Five

Published

11 years ago

January 6, 2016

Admin

A Dull Blade

♦ With the release of Hateful Eight in the UK on 8 January, we thought we would take another look at the previous seven films of Quentin Tarantino. It’ll be one per day, and today is the turn of his fifth film, Kill Bill Vol.2, released back in 2004.

Kill Bill Vol.2

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Stars: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen

Six months down the line, Tarantino released Kill Bill Vol.2, the conclusion to the story that was started in Vol.1. The first film was by no means perfect: an indulgent, poorly paced, paper-thin exercise, but compared to that, Kill Bill Vo1.2 is longer and even less cohesive. The director ditched the visual pastiches the viewer was treated to in the first film, leaving us with a very protracted revenge story interspersed with the odd flashback.

The film reveals how The Bride was trained in martial arts by master Chinese warrior Pai Mei, bringing matters to a head between her and Bill (Carradine). It also turns out that the Bride’s unborn child actually survived the slaughter at the wedding. However, without the visual flair of part one, this tale of revenge descends into drab autopilot, with scattered moments of ultraviolence and tepid dialogue. Whatever characterisation there was in the first volume has evaporated, this second helping a long drawn-out series of fights.

Perhaps if Tarantino had reined in his ardour for producing two films where one would have sufficed, Kill Bill might have been a decent career follow-up to Jackie Brown. But sadly Kill Bill, and in particular, the second volume, feels like a diffuse, overlong love letter to the Far Eastern films in which Tarantino discovered his muse. Unlike its forerunners, there is no subtext or subtlety to speak of here, no overriding arc. Carradine is certainly passable, but Bill is just a vehicle for Tarantino’s increasingly artificial, stilted dialogue. The rest of the cast are barely ciphers, such is their superficiality – their sole purpose being to die in an innovatively graphic fashion. You sense that this labour of love is close to Tarantino’s heart, which needless to say would apply to all of his product – but in the end this is a beautiful yet sadly empty confection, a let-down after the discipline of his previous triumphs.