Fresh in its absurdity but nowhere near a masterpiece status

Rating: 7/10 (11 February 2007)

This volume is a lot different from the first one but it wouldn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. While the first one was all about style and little substance, this one tries to be a little more deeper in meaning. Unfortunately, the serious drama side isn't as convincing and successful as the light and stylish fighting side is in these movies.
The film is divided in five different chapters. Whereas the first volume was more or less linear in its storytelling, this time around the chapters are much more disjointed from each other. The flashbacks don't fit into the flow of the movie smoothly. The plot in itself is a very simple revenge story and I guess what most consider the main treats in the movie are the dialogue and the explosive albeit short action sequences. Well, the dialogue isn't the most typical one you hear in movies but it also often feels forced. The plot is full of absurd moments and sometimes those moments feel a little too self-pretentious.
The use of music, the absurd plot and some over the top characters...it's all intriguing to watch but it still is mainly just eye-candy. The substance in the story just isn't there. Even though this volume spends much more time evolving Uma Thurman's character it actually is a disservice to the film because I don't feel related to the character any more than in the beginning of the movie, as a matter of fact the exact opposite. The pain was much more touching in the first volume. In this volume many scenes are too long and and serve little purpose to actually explain the motives of main characters. The dialogue is supposed to be witty, I guess, but mostly it is either too simple and repetitive or tries to be funny a little too obviously.
I'm not saying the movie is completely bad, far from it. The style of the movie is still fascinating and the basic plot is OK in all its simplicity. Some of the acting is excellent (Carradine as Bill and Madsen as Budd especially) although Thurman's character loses a lot of its appeal. It might be due to some odd writing (the sequence where she's meeting Pai Mei is not very convincing) or due to Thurman's little one-sided facial expressions. Anyhow, this movie is something you should see just for the sake of it.
This movie comes down to personal preferences like all movies of course. If the often absurd plot and dialogue amuses you a lot and the small lack of substance or coherent storytelling doesn't bother you you might just love the movie for its cool style. The first volume was cool in its style and this has some of the same characteristics. However, the slow pace and the emphasis on the drama side isn't working as well as it should if you call this one of the best movies of all time. This is a nice experiment and in many ways you can see how Tarantino has had some fun adding funny little sequences and things here and there but in the end the movie as a whole isn't coherent or deep, it's just a fun montage of more or less cool and sometimes naive things and tricks.