Kill Bill Vol.2 English Movie
It seems to be the season for sequels - and successful ones too! First "Spiderman", then "Shrek" and now the killingly violent "Kill Bill".... In each instance the sequel has proved far more enriching than the original film.
While "Kill Bill 1" and its maddeningly murderous manoeuvres made us restless,
its sequel has a lot more creative energy beneath the ongoing orgies of skirmishes.
The battle-lines are far more sharply drawn. Tarantino's exceptional skills at probing the psychology of violence by using the visual medium as a tool of irony is more on display here than ever before.
Like the first part, "Kill Bill 2" is terribly violent. The world that Tarantino constructs within and around his protagonist is a realm of abrupt and prolonged brutality. Human life is seen as constantly prone to being subject to grimy violence where death seems a welcome release.
At the onset, the heroine 'The Bride' (Uma Thurman) is buried alive by her chief adversary Bill's bouncer-brother Budd (Michael Madsen). The stark and unabashed sadism of the whole exercise is mitigated by spurts of unexpected humour and bathos. Thurman, locked in a claustrophobic casket underground, brings to us a feeling of being cloistered and smothered from all sides.
This ability to suck us into its irreversible savagery is a gift unique to Tarantino. This time he punctuates his binges of brutal barbarism, veering at times on parody, with layers of gentleness.
As Thurman lies six feet underground, her mind floats into her samurai training with her Japanese guru.
The scenes where the old man torments and teases Thurman into a martial discipline almost seem to be a homage to "The Karate Kid" series of films.
It is astonishing how Tarantino picks on various kitschy genres and turns them around to delineate the characters as both stereotypes and as unique to his vision. As Thurman cracks the coffin with expert grace to emerge from her living grave her hand emerges from the mud, like a ghoul in a third-rate horror flick.
The action is staged with self-conscious glee. The music on the soundtrack is conspicuous enough to seem like over-dubbed sound effects. Standing at the centre of this passionate pop art is Uma Thurman, her agility more pronounced here than it was in the first part.
Thurman's energy and her nostril-flaring machismo are done with great flair and some cutting humour. In a flashback, a fresh spurt of violence erupts just after she discovers she's pregnant. When a Japanese female assassin guns her way into Thurman's home, she hides behind the sofa and pleads with her adversary that she's just discovered she's in the family way.
The assassin murmurs her congratulations and walks out. Woman-to-woman, from one killer to another, Tarantino takes his narrative from passionate violence to empathetic bonding without changing the charged, seething and simmering mood of the narrative.
Thurman's fight to the finish with the one-eyed female adversary (played with rugged gusto by Daryl Hannah) is enacted with great panache. Hannah's painful execution of Buddy with a deadly snake tucked away in ill-gotten money is so over-the-top, it tears across the screen with a ripping roaring fury, taking down with its intensity not just Hannah's other eye, but also any distant claim to subtlety that this screaming series on female machismo might have aspired to.
This is a very angry film, more so than part "1", though on this occasion the anger is often self-directed and consummated with repentance and apologies.
At several points, this violent conflict of painful vendetta and gratuitous self- redemption mixes mayhem with maudlin emotions. Check out the grand finale when Thurman finally breaks into Bill's abode with a smoking gun...only to see Bill (David Carradine) ensconced in a happy-family twosome with her little daughter.
The self-conscious and bewildering balance between violence and innocence that Tarantino creates here i
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