Contains extensive spoilers, sorry. Don't read it if you haven't seen it.

Okay, let's be up front about this. Kill Bill Volume 2 isn't as exciting as Kill Bill Volume 1. It sounds harsh, but in all fairness, there's very little that's as exciting as Kill Bill Volume 1. It's slower. I don't want to be sword-hungry action guy, but the flawless violence of the first film is nowhere near as present here; though the film does feature one of the best fight scenes since Raising Arizona, Tarantino has a different purpose here. Where only rating concerns and running time constrained the balletic thrill of Volume 1, Tarantino himself decides here that the impact should be different, and we understand it early on. As the Massacre At Two Pines edges closer, as Bill makes his ominous first appearance, as Tarantino has always excelled at making us antsy even before scenes in which we know exactly what will happen - as through Pulp Fiction, for instance, when the film so often leads up to what we have already seen - we might not be blamed (especially if we have recently seen Volume 1 [as intended]) for gearing up for a little of that same violence, even if we know the result to be a little one-sided, even if we have seen it opening both movies and played out in a variety of scenes in the first volume. When the Fox Force Five - sorry, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad - makes their entrance, they approach not in a serious dramatic manner but a knowing one, almost a giddy one, and suddenly Tarantino goes the other way: the camera tilts up and to the side, and though I don't know why it's always got to be Madsen, it unmistakeably recalls that same tilt in Reservoir Dogs, documented pretty extensively as causing a fair amount of anxiety in viewers, many of whom later recounted seeing it differently. The gist of the thousands of words written about that scene is that viewers were far more disturbed than they would have been by keeping the camera on the action. Kill Bill 2 both bears that out and calls it into doubt on different occasions; this first tilt is the clue that the pain Tarantino will inflict over the course of volume 2 is more anguish than abattoir.

The eventual disposition of California Mountain Snake's eye might elicit both ewwws and ooze, but in the long run it's more a shot for visual effect and squirming purposes than one that will likely make any real psychological impact. Bill and B.B.'s recounting of the goldfish story, by contrast, seems to have some emotional impact in its distanced recounting, for all involved characters and ideally for the audience as well. The sticking point, and it's a rough one, is the shot that now opens two movies, of the then-Bride shot down by her baby. It's graphic (that is to say, it's violent, but more that it's very uncomfortably onscreen, and though DVD freeze-frame may not eventually bear this out, it seems much more so in the second volume), but the inverse-effect theory does not work here: it's the most emotionally painful moment of the film, and this in a film where the protagonist is more battered than Job, or Jude Law in Cold Mountain.

If Tarantino beats up Thurman pretty badly in the first one, he downright tortures her here; it may be a little less physical and more psychological than Vol. 1, but so too is the entire film, and overall it makes more sense than just as a marketing tool to cut the film in half. The pace is decidedly different, and it feels like...

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Topics: movies