Vengeance is mined
With Kill Bill: Volume 2 Quentin Tarantino completes what for better or worse represents his vision for the new millennium-- a three-hour chick-takes-revenge flick with obscure allusions to martial arts movies, gunslinger movies, pulpy genre fare of all kinds.
It's Tarantino's encyclopedic knowledge of video rentals, distilled and summarized and rendered in comic-dramatic form. Useless trying to decide whether this is or is not an improvement over Volume 1, a rather meaningless collection of ultraviolent fight sequences: the one completes the other, the first giving us a lurid display of the countless colorful ways in which a human being can be killed maimed or otherwise injured, physically and psychologically (decided emphasis on the physical), the second being a somewhat more thoughtful meditation on why someone might want to commit such acts. The first half is more an exhibition of Yuen Woo Ping's kickass martial arts fight choreography, with Tarantino barely able to play catch-up with his camera, the second a more fitting exhibition of Tarantino's patented dialogue, with prominent use of his one great gift-- the casting of a ready-to-be-rehabilitated-for-prime-time character actor, in this case, David Carradine of Kung Fu and Death Race 2000 fame, as the eponymous Bill. Say what you will of Tarantino, he was right; Miramax erred in splitting this into two.
The question then-- how good is Kill Bill, the severed halves taken as a complete whole? The movie references Chang Cheh, Liu Chia Liang, John Woo, King Hu, Sergio Leone among others; you wonder what Tarantino brings to the party that you couldn't get watching the original movies. Okay, big screen and stereo sound, if you happen to catch the commercial screening; the effect of disparate ingredients tossed into a big pot and letting the flavors simmer, hopefully to fuse into a palatable whole.
Doesn't happen, I say, and it's the same problem I noted with the first volume: Tarantino's a basically clever scriptwriter with a talent for scoring and casting who has lucked into enough clout and boxoffice to direct his own scripts. Oh, he knows how to pace-- knows how to alternate scenes of furious motion with moments of tense stillness (he's presumably seen enough martial arts movies to at least notice the pattern), and he knows how to use the crucial detail, bright bit of color, sudden sound effect, to startle scenes into life.
Tarantino can elicit lively performances-- maybe his best work was directing a script from a real writer, Elmore Leonard's Jackie Brown, with resulting lived-in characters and depth of feeling you don't see in Tarantino's other work. Here the actors appear relaxed and ready to give all: Michael Madsen's Budd inhabits his broken-down trailer as if sprouted from the multistained carpet complete with matching chin fuzz and unimaginable body odors; Darryl Hannah is even better as treacherous Elle Driver, with sinuous moves, long backstory, and one-eyed deadly glare necessary to possibly beat the Bride in single combat. There's the handful of supporting performances, from Samuel Jackson (who hit big in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction) to Bo Svenson (the Walking Tall sequels and TV series), though my favorite has to be Gordon Liu (36th Chamber of Shaolin) as the sadistic martial-arts trainer with slightly mis-synchronized laugh.
Uma Thurman I've noted before as having a not very complex character to play, but her role is physically demanding enough that you're nevertheless impressed (she's no Michelle Yeoh not even a Zhang Ziyi, but she does try very hard). Tarantino fills the blank spaces in her character with gags and gore and the resulting portrait, while definitely more detailed than the blank stare of vengeance that swaggered its way through Volume 1, remains a cartoon sketch; it's the punishment meted out to her and that she metes out in return that gives her Beatrix Kiddo the necessary amplitude to stand out--action here literally and necessarily being character (there isn't much else).
Maybe the most impressive performance in the picture is the one lying in wait near the end-- namely, Bill. Carradine gives perhaps the performance of his career; his Bill is a lazy serpent of a man, economical in movement and expression, at his threatening best when he languidly lays himself open to Thurman's Beatrix, offering her (an exquisitely cruel touch) a taste of the domesticity she never had a chance to experience-- and, if he has anything to do with it, never will.
But these are all flavorful chunks of meat and potatoes in a stew that never quite coheres-- that doesn't have a genuine action filmmaker at its core pulling it all together. I can think of alternatives-- Yuen Woo Ping aside from doing tremendous choreography work is an accomplished director (Drunken Master; Iron Monkey); and Tarantino's bosom buddy Robert Rodriguez has the style but struggles with his scripts (which is why the best picture either Tarantino or Rodriguez may have done was From Dusk Till Dawn, a genre-bending collaboration between the two). This is a labor of love, and I understand Tarantino wanting to do it himself; too bad what Tarantino wants isn't necessarily what the movie so badly needs.
First published in Businessworld 7/9/04
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