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...about the Bride (Uma Thurman), a hit woman who had been "jetting around the world killing human beings and being paid vast sums of money" as a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad--DIVAS for short. In Vol. 1 she went straight, got left for dead in the slaughter of her wedding party and, years later, began to take revenge on the killers: the rest of the DIVAS and their charismatic boss, Bill (David Carradine). Vol. 2 finishes the tale as the Bride tracks down Bill's brother Budd (Michael Madsen) and one-eyed Elle (Daryl Hannah) before...
There's enough blood here to appease the Passion of the Christ crowd, plus a nifty catfight in a trailer, a virtuoso buried-alive scene and some Old Testament retribution (an eye for an eye). But Vol. 2 reduces the casualties and gentles down the mood. You get less kill, more Bill. The first was show, this is tell--anecdotes at 10 paces. Of course, this being a Tarantino film, the conversations are as long and lurid and finely choreographed as the martial-arts set pieces. (The auteur is a bit of a diva himself: he loves arias, visual...
...Vol. 1 was, at heart, a movie about movies--a whirlwind graduate course in pulp-film culture. Vol. 2 also boasts some scenes that will have cultists attaching mental footnotes: flicked references to John Ford's The Searchers and the Jackie Chan--Michelle Yeoh Supercop, as well as a rehabilitation of Pei Mei, a.k.a. White Eyebrow, a villainous character from '70s Hong Kong action films. Here he's a stern but endearing teacher (played with majestic comic brio by the legendary Gordon Liu). You'll also make the Kung Fu connection. That was the '70s TV series that made Carradine...
...video-nerd one-upmanship, Vol. 2 is a relationship movie, a character study. It focuses on a handful of ornery but ordinary folks--the three remaining killers--and the flashes of rancor, jealousy, ennui and humor that illuminate their lives in the moments before the Bride tries to end them. The two brothers even achieve a reflective acceptance of their guilt. As Budd tells Bill, "That woman deserves her revenge. And we deserve to die." A pause. "Then again, so does she." Well, nobody's perfect...
Neither is Vol. 2. Its beguiling actors are urged to take their time delivering lines. (Does anyone in real life speak as slowly as everyone does in movies?) There's little suspense as to who will be alive at the end--just the poignancy of bad guys waiting to get a taste of what they have so often dished...