subtly disturbing

Rating: 1/10 (24 April 2004)

So the second half of Tarantino's epic Kill Bill promised to be the pick me up the first required to stand up and be validated. It failed miserably in that attempt. Beware, there may be some spoilers.
Kill Bill 2 suffers from a shift in directorial tone so drastic that much of what Tarantino so effectively did in the first one was lost. In the second installment the audience is shown the softer side of Thurman's character. Instead of the spectacle of Thurman out slaughtering hundreds of people in enacting her heroic vengeance, we see her succumb to the psychological trauma that would naturally follow from what she had just participated in. The empowered woman of the first installment (which is a problem in itself: giving a woman a sword and implying that she's empowered) had all together fallen apart and assumed the role of the helpless and weak.
Kill Bill 2 lacks the elaborately sarcastic violence that made the first volume close to palatable. The second is filled with an overtly sadistic misogyny that is disturbing to watch, for example, Budd shooting Thurman in the chest with rock salt and burying her alive after threatening to fill her eye-sockets with mace. All of this in an uncomfortably close quarters with Thurman so that we can watch her suffer. Where the first movie had fun with its overblown violence; the second relishes in a much more terribly painful place.
Kill Bill 2, does however; include some instances of rich dialogue. There is a scene where Carradine and Thurman discuss superheroes and why it is that they are popular. The audience learns the appeal of superman, where he differs from other super heroes. Instead of a human that changes to an alter ego, superman is an alter ego that changes into a human. This conversation is reminiscent of Tarantino's older works, but is short-lived.

One of the problems with the Kill Bill movies may actually be with more than just the movie. Tarantino champions the middle-class white male perspective, and this perspective becomes visible if we consider the stereotypes adopted by each character. For example in the first movie we see a juxtaposition of two kinds of stereotypes imposed on Japanese women by American men. The first is the school girl, adopted by Oren Ishi's body guard, and the other is Oren herself, dressed in traditional Japanese garb for the final battle with Thurman. In the first installment, Tarantino effectively wrapped these stereotypes and issues into a sardonic and nearly humorous violence. In the second, Tarantino disregards that tone. So what the audience is left with is a plot that very subtly declares a deeper malaise beyond the movie. It exposes an unspoken evolution in American racism and sexism, and I believe it does so unintentionally.

Half of what made me feel ill when I left the movie theater last Sunday was the movie, and the other half was its being so popular