A Long Trail That Has No Turning.

Rating: 6/10 (26 April 2012)

"Pulp Fiction" struck me as a haphazard masterpiece of originality. The incongruity was startling -- Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames tied up in a basement, their mouth stuffed with Japanese S/M balls, and an old Turkish pop song clanging away loudly in the background. And, wow, did "Pulp Fiction" have style of a particularly visual sort. It was hard to care who lived or died except that it's usually better when characters survive.
"Kill Bill, Vol. 2," is an extended revenge story full of twists, pain, and blood. In this one, I cared chiefly that the heroine, Uma Thurman, would survive. Who could not? The gangly all-encompassing limbs. The long monkey feet. The bent nose. The plumbless blue depths of those irises as they peer at us out of a face spattered with gore.
But this is a triumph of visuals in which the characters and actions are stylized almost out of existence. People strike odd poses and speak deliberately, relishing each syllable. The amazing thing is that despite the abstraction of style and its fragile roots in reality Tarantino manages to get moments of genuine excitement and terror out of the story. It makes you not want to be buried alive.
The highlight comes when two blond babes -- Thurman and Darryl Hannah -- face one another with and without expensive Japanese Hondo swords. The camera zooms in and out in a frenzy, sometimes with only a single eyeball as its focus, while the air inside a shack is filled with flying kicks and flashing steel, of a like never before seen by any human being except those who have known my ex wife. I'll tell you, this scene alone left me panting and exhausted.
But for all the flash, it's more a fantasy than anything else, only one or two steps away from a kid's cartoon or a computer war game. I got some of the in jokes and allusions, I think, but the imagery becomes tiresome after a while. It all prompted me to with that everyone had sat down for an hour or two with a couple of bottles of Dos Equis and simply, I don't know, taken a breather.