Tarantino does it again...

Rating: 1/10 (20 April 2004)

Tarantino falls back into his old groove with Kill Bill: Vol. 2 - a groove that sees the mediocre director trying to pass trash off as art. As with all of Tarantino's films (sans the legitimately well-crafted Pulp Fiction), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 works exceedingly hard at coming across as smarter than it really is... and as always, this ultimately fruitless technique leaves Tarantino's film looking even worse than it needed to.
Even operating under the notion that the film is making a conscious effort to make fun of itself and point out how bad it truly is, it still falls flat. By relying on the same two gags over and over again, Tarantino is offering up a veritable admission that he's in too far over his head, and that he really has no clue what he's doing.
To top it all off, Tarantino lies back on techniques usually reserved for enhancing a film, or, at the very least, enhancing a scene. But Tarantino throws these techniques in haphazardly, filming a scene in black and white not because it helps the scene in any way, but simply because he's taking a random crack at producing intelligence.
Looking at the two films (Volume 1 and Volume 2) as a whole, it becomes painfully obvious that Tarantino split these up solely in an effort to make more money, or else he has no sense of direction whatsoever, because the two films are split as unevenly as possible. Even as one film, all the action takes place at the beginning and all the elements that are supposed to represent plot and character development are crammed into the latter half. Even worse, this second film is comprised mostly of filler that has no real relevance to the story that Tarantino is already butchering.
All in all, the film is nothing you wouldn't expect from Tarantino, but that's not a good thing by any means. The characters are flat and uninteresting, the dialogue is Tarantino's worst to date, and the whole film feels more like a mockery of cinematic techniques than anything else. On the whole, this film isn't quite as much an abysmal failure as the first, but it comes close.