Entertaining, and completes the story

Rating: 8/10 (26 September 2019)

Highlights:

Completes the story and fills out the characters.
Uma Thurman is perfect in the lead role. The scenes where she's training under the old master, Pai Mei (Gordon Parks) are fantastic.
The buried alive scene is horrifying and iconic.
The black mamba and ensuing fight between Daryl Hannah (Elle) and Thurman is also very satisfying.
The fish out of water analogy for life/death, and the comments about Superman/Clark Kent during an otherwise slow scene. It's an action film but Tarantino occasionally sprinkles in some wonderful bits of dialogue or monologue.
As usual with Tarantino, the homage to these genres and the sheer joy of filmgoing really comes through.

Lowlights:

David Carradine as Bill. Far too old at 68, lisping through his dialogue-heavy scenes, and not nearly strong and menacing enough. The final chapter was pretty tepid.
Pacing was too slow, particularly early and late (starting with the weak scene with the pimp). It seems the right balance was not found between the two films, and it would have been much better tightened up and a single film, 2.5 to 3 hours long.
The two instances in this volume (to go with one in the first) of female characters intent on killing one another and immediately stopping because a child is present (in one case, in utero) gets a little ridiculous. After being shot in the face, raped over years in a hospital, sliced up and shot some more, buried alive, etc she's going to stop to make sandwiches and cuddle? It's an homage to strong women characters who can also be mothers which is great, but these bits ring false, culminating in that ultra-cheesy last line about the lioness rejoining her cub.

Still though, despite all my gripes, it's a very fun film. Tarantino sets the bar higher with everything he puts into his films, and sometimes it's easy to forget that in critiquing them. While we can see where this one is going, we really have no idea what he's going to put on the screen next, and he's always entertaining.