#35 - Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

What the fuck. That is all I have to say about this film. What the fuck.

I mean, what the hell happened in between both films? Did Tarantino regret his decision to make an homage to old martial arts films and just made a realistic film? That is my biggest complaint. This film is not bad, in fact, I'd say it's good, but the difference between the tone of the first film and the second is gargantuan. Too big to be anything but dissapointed. I wanted the bride to cut limbs and buckets of blood to be spilled all over the screen, I wanted over the top violence and performances. Instead I get this.

My second biggest complaint is how slow paced the film is. By slow paced, I mean we don't get any fighting scenes until the second half of the film. And by action scenes I mean ten minutes of the bride fighting that blond chick with the eyepatch for ten minutes, which was good but doesn't nearly make up for the rest of the film's sluggishness. The worse is, we are "teased" more, but eventually nothing happens. More than once I said to myself, "dang, some shit's about to happen!". Nope. More dialogue.

     

There's a very interesting dialogue about Superman, of all things, though. It's a great reflection, but still...

Plot wise, we find out more about the bride's past, like how how she was trained by an old Chinese master, and uses her training and knowledge to escape a coffin she is buried alive in (the only other exciting moment of this film). We also see Bill and her were lovers before she was about to get married to someone else, and the former was the father of her child... Which turns out to be alive, by the way. Whoops, normally I would put a spoiler warning but that happens and the middle of the film so... yeah. I won't spoil the ending, but all I can tell you is that it was more than unsatisfactory.

I get what Tarantino was trying to do here. You could say that he could make a standalone film with this tone and characters and it could work pretty well, but making it the second part of an over the top homage to an over the top genre... I was expecting something the second part to follow the style of the first one. You know, because they are VOLUME 1 and VOLUME 2, right?

     

E.g. you decided to bleep out the bride's name the entire first part, only to reveal it later. WHY

So, my verdict on the entire saga is: if you're into the kind of violence it promotes watch the first film because it's totally worth watching. If you want, go ahead and watch the second part; I warn you, it's a completely different movie, though.