Bang!

Rating: 9/10 (18 April 2004)

Volume 1 was nifty. The world and the characters Tarantino set up were intriguing. The pastiche of genres was darn cool. The camera work was phenomenal. The violence got to be a bit much at times (as if T was sitting around, scratching his head and saying: "where can i make blood spurt out of now?"). But the coolest things about Vol. 1 were the tantalizing hints of back-story.
Volume 2 makes good on the promise of the first, and may actually be the better movie.
It's different. There's not so much screentime devoted to gore. The style shifts aren't so abrupt. It's actually more cohesive and more-or-less linear. The characters are phenomenal, as are the actor who portray them.

Above all of this, it's a wonderfully done anti-hero picture. The moral ambiguity is absolutely delicious. I think Buddy sums it up best when he says that they deserve to die--but so does she. So... shrug. We'll see. As surreal and stylized as the movie is, the characters seem very real and honest, and just weird enough to charm your socks off.

Finally, Tarantino deserves some major credit for digging Carradine out of the depths of obscurity for this movie. If you consider how much of this movie rested on a title character who got very little screentime, you'll see why it was so important that Carradine made the part of Bill his own.
Chalk me down as a non-Tarantino-fan who really enjoyed this movie.