Marred by its sporadic nature and constant post-modern references but it offers a few brief, if effective, scenes of a harrowing and heart wrenching nature.

Rating: 6/10 (25 November 2008)

The second volume of Kill Bill marks Tarantino's first failing as a director; it's a minute failing but it's a failing all the same. What is Kill Bill: Volume 2 other than a nicely shot and well acted freak show that follows a revenge story arc but not really as we know it? By the time we are within sight of the finish line, we will have encountered eighty year old pimps sitting and chatting in chairs mumbling about where a certain someone is; we will have encountered Bill, after he was kept anonymous in the first film, playing a pipe of some sort and we will have spent a couple of scenes with a former international assassin who's now living out his days as a Redneck.
It's these sorts of people and these sorts of scenes that make Kill Bill: Volume 2 the mismatch film that it is. It's a lot of good ideas and one or two harrowing scenes basically patched together around a basic revenge goal. The film is not the complete experience but then again the film was chopped into two halves anyway and the result is one part brilliant, brutal and engaging (volume 1); one part drawn out, slow and unrewarding (volume 2).
You remember individual scenes from Volume 2, you don't remember the full product as an experience. Sure, the burial scene is harrowing and the scene in which The Bride (Thurman) has a certain encounter with a certain someone nearer the end will tug at a lot of people's heartstrings and the sure, individual shots of The Bride walking amongst the heat wave and the bizarre crash zooms into Pai Mei's (Hui Liu) face as a he strokes his beard in a nonchalant fashion stay with you for reasons of a sporadic nature. These moments are memorable, if not rather good but the frustrations lie in the referencing to other texts for the sake of being post-modern and the consistency with the characters.
Bending the lines between reality, fantasy, realism and escapism; The Bride sits in a car and delivers a monologue to the camera about how she's going to 'Kill Bill' at the film's very beginning. She even makes a comparison between herself and a movie, likening herself to a 'roaring rampage of revenge' reminding us that this is just a film after all. Then Tarantino chucks in what he does best in terms of manipulating narratives and that's including flashbacks as well as flashbacks within flashbacks. The Bride's first encounter with Bill (Carradine) and the general scenes around the wedding chapel early on work well through the menace Bill brings to the screen. It's effective because we know thanks to the first film what's to come, it is a matter of getting to that point and how it all plays out that is the suspense. Even stranger, Bill comes across as relatively well mannered, even nice, with his soft tone and slow, relatively passive movements that further create illusions of his true persona. It's no coincidence Tarantino selects the side angle when the two come face to face for the first time – the sort of composition that creates that 'face off' scenario.
Additionally, Tarantino gives space to Budd (Masden) to grow ever so slightly. Budd's early interaction with his boss for being late for his shift at work leads us down a route of possible confrontation but Budd is passive and lacks that killer instinct – something we wouldn't associate with an assassin. This makes his lack of ruthlessness toward The Bride later on all the more effective and instead, we get a harrowing burial scene rather than an upfront execution. All the villains in the film are sadistic but simplistic; they manage to think up crude and downright nasty ways to eliminate their foes, be it a live burial or a snake in a briefcase but there doesn't seem to be any real flow to it all.
The antagonism flits around the place; in volume 1 Bill is a mysterious unseen figure of all thigs sadistic, the next he is playing a flute by a campfire. Tarantino deployed this tactic in Pulp Fiction with Marcellus Wallace and it worked even when we finally saw his face, but here it falls rather flat. The film is a freak show of one eyed kung-fu femme fatales; 80 year old pimps whose whores have populated nearby villages with their young, thus taking the surrounding areas for the old man and comic book spouting psychopaths who have developed their own truth serum. The truth to this is that I think Tarantino gets carried away with himself – it's as if he reaches a certain height and then tries to top himself further with more outlandish content. This is particularly significant towards the end when Bill's luxurious house plays out as the setting for the final confrontation, but it's more of a circus than a bad guy's lair.
Some of the best scenes are scrubbed out by some of the more unbelievable and just plain silly. The Bride's interaction with an assassin in a hotel room feels awkwardly out of place and just plain daft whereas Pai Mei's constant laughing and beard stroking to crash zooms feels like a pastiche too far, no matter how potentially enjoyable in a guilty manner. But that's the key word: 'potentially'. The film feels like a missed opportunity, a film that with a calmer head and a more focused eye might have been pretty good. As it is, it's good in individual sections but actually pretty forgettable in the long run.