afterbirth

Rating: 2/10 (25 April 2004)

Kill Bill, Vol. 2 is the ugly, sadistic, misshapen, and vulgar offspring of a cinematic barbarian, Quentin Tarantino.
Worse, it's boring.
This is truly one of the most wretched films I've ever sat through, on every level. The movie has no style; rather like a particularly bad episode of Saturday Night Live, each scene seems beamed in from a different planet in the solar system. Trying to get into the groove with this movie is like trying to eat poached eggs while riding in the back of a Dune buggy. It just ain't gonna happen.
The most notable aspect of the film is the obvious sadistic pleasure Tarantino takes in dreaming up cruel and violent deaths for his characters, then filming the demise in agonizingly clinical close-ups. The fact that the director obviously believes all this carnage is righteous revenge only adds to the squalor. If Tarantino was an 8th grader, he'd be sent in for counseling. Since he's a film director, he'll be congratulated for his "edginess" by those who think that the only way to measure art is by the jolt it gives you on the Richter scale.
While this movie has been repeatedly described as a "Kung Fu movie", in fact it is nothing of the sort. Tarantino doesn't begin to have the discipline to make a genre picture. Kill Bill, Vol. 2 is a self-indulgent flatulence that borrows devices from Kung Fu, Spaghetti Westerns, horror movies, and comic books in the haphazard manner a hyperactive, pimply-faced junior-high delinquent rummages through his stunted intellectual landscape before writing "F*ck Mrs. Jones" on the urinal wall between classes.
Kill Bill, Vol 2 might be described as trash, but that wouldn't be fair to trashy movies. It utterly lacks the essential joie de vivre that makes a good drive-in romp fun to chew popcorn to. Indeed, Kill Bill takes itself seriously -- deadly seriously -- and is as dull, self-righteous and dim-witted as a Driver's Ed movie. Time at first seems to stand still in this movie, as one interminable monologue after another explicates the minute science of mamba snakes or the trivialities of running a strip joint. By the time the film is over it has gotten so slow that time literally runs backwards: Tarantino makes you sit through the credits of the first Kill Bill at the end of this one... his ultimate and final act of self-indulgence.
Tarantino is a hack, and this movie is his hacksaw. Steer far clear.