Over-elaboration on the Motif of Physical Cruelty

Rating: Null/10 (24 April 2004)

Spoilers
There the heroine is, scene after scene, bloodied, covered in clots and forming scabs, blotched with lesions, bulging with contusions, all lathered in sweat, shaking and panting in agony and exhaustion. (In flashbacks to her time with Pei Mai, bloodless and character-rounding for the most part, she is tormented by him with an arm lock that has her screaming and begging, snot and saliva dripping in a long strand to the ground as she writhes miserably in close up.) She is buried alive and left for dead, apparently past all hope, and we have a ringside seat for the whole ghastly misogynistic thing, complete with blithe and bonny crosscutting to every stray event taking place within a 5000 mile or 10 year radius. Read that: Her suffering is ridiculously, obscenely studied, protracted and severe.
Is it significant, I wonder, that both 'volumes' of this film begin with a close up of the main female character's swollen and gashed face, her bloodied head being shot point blank with a large caliber handgun as she begs for life? --As if once wasn't enough.
What's that all about? What does it say that this stuff goes down so well with the audience? For sure, it goes light years beyond just establishing firm character motivation. It seems clear that somebody thrills at the sight of this pretty lady being put into a world of hurt. --And in this, the audience is every bit as implicated as the artist.
Hide behind claims that it is parody or comedy, if you will, or just a hip exercise in pastiche style. But what is lacking in this film is humanity, nothing less than decency. It is truly pornographic. Many people have charged the same of The Passion for indulging with reverence and horror in the same kind of over-elaborated physical suffering this film does apparently for kicks.
I concede that my failure to stomach this film in the spirit in which it is supposed to be offered can be construed as totally not hip and not tough. Well, guilty as charged. Some people will claim that life, with its careening, out-of-control random violence, has escalated from horror to absurdity to comedy in the last several decades. There is only one problem with that point of view: Comedy or no, none of us has the room to laugh. --And that's exactly what Kill Bill 1 and 2 encourages us to do.
Zero stars. Bill 2 is a technically competent film. But as nearly all major films these days can make the same claim, that is not a recommendation for it. In the all-important areas outside the merely technical-- namely the moral and thematic -- Bill 2 is 1) reprehensible and 2) a mess. It's nothing more than cool (that's debatable) and conscienceless trash.