Kill Bill: Vol. 2

The second half of the same narrative, and an entirely different film. The first film was a fight film. This one talks. The opening goes back to the rehearsal at the chapel. For the first time we see what happened that day all the way through. Two targets remain. One lives in a caravan in the desert, the other is a woman with one eye. From there the film goes back and tells the training. An old master on a mountain, hundreds of steps, a wooden block, and a punch thrown from very close. There is a burial in the middle. A coffin in the dark and a single torch; that section is the tensest thing in the film and there is no fighting in it. What the narrative is interested in is not revenge but cause: the film finally explains why she was shot, and that explanation makes you read the whole story again. Bill finally appears. The character sits at a long table and speaks calmly, and the last section is a conversation rather than a fight. The speech about superhero comics is the most quoted part. The two films were made in a single shooting period and released separately; together they run over four hours. Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and Gordon Liu are in the cast. Quentin Tarantino wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who has seen the first film. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the same pace; this one is slow, talky and closer to a western.