Vol. 2 continues the revenge tale of an expert assassin, called The Bride, who sets out on a quest to wreak vengeance upon her former employer, Bill, and other members of their assassin circle, for shooting her at her wedding—along with everyone else in attendance—and leaving her for dead. When this chapter in the story begins, The Bride has already encountered some of her targets as she continues battling her way up the chain of command, knowing it will ultimately lead her to her main goal: her chance to “Kill Bill.”
Vol. 2 is almost wholly expository in nature. Whereas Vol. 1 dazzled us in large part because we knew very little of the semi-mythic, superhuman characters that we encountered, Vol. 2 seeks to explain the characters’ lives and thereby dulls their seeming majesty. We find that The Bride is as human and as vulnerable as we are; instead of being the untouchable sword-wielding bitch-goddess that she was in Vol. 1, we find her to be a sentimental and susceptible motherly figure that we can all relate to.
While it is true that being able to relate to a film’s main character is almost universally a filmic virtue, it is not so in Vol. 2. Vol. 1 created a mythology of grand, larger than life figures that tantalized us because of their murderous, yet strangely artistic lives. We understood that these figures were supposed to be legendary in nature, and not figures that we could relate to. This is precisely why Vol. 1 was so deserving of our awe.
Vol. 2 attempts to explicate in great detail the mythology behind the characters, but in doing so, it also robs us of the awe and inspiration that we felt towards the Bride and her world of murderous revenge. Although The Bride kicks as much ass this time around as she did the last time, her mystique is lost in the full explication of her story.
In Vol.1, we knew very little about the Bride, and indeed about any of the characters that populated the movie. Some characters were merely referenced, and never even shown to us. This created a myth without a proper mythology—a story without a history. Instead of making Vol.1 incomprehensible or forgettable, however, this had the effect of making the characters seem otherworldly, beyond our reach, and even awe-inspiring.
Through explication of The Bride’s story, Tarantino divests the series of its mystical spirit, only to leave us with nothing but an ordinary tale of spite and revenge with an all too sappy ending. And for that, we cannot forgive him.
I’d give Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2 a B-.
"...Tarantino divests the series of its mystical spirit, only to leave us with nothing but an ordinary tale of spite and revenge with an all too sappy ending."
director: quentin tarantino
starring: uma thurman, david carradine, michael madsen, darryl hannah, gordon liu, michael parks
