”I’m the deadliest woman in the world — but right now, I’m just scared shitless about my baby!” With these words, Uma Thurman’s pregnant Bride puts the finishing touches to her iconic status: flinging her description defiantly at a would-be assassin. This second part of Quentin Tarantino’s pulp-guignol shocker is destined to see Thurman fully assume the mantle of warrior queen and martial-arts mom.
Once again, Tarantino has seen off the imitators, detractors and condescenders. True, the Kill Bill films do not have the dialogue riffs of his earlier work but, as any screenplay handbook will tell you, writing for motion pictures is not about penning lines of dialogue; it is about fashioning a narrative and constructing an event. This one delivers something purely, physiologically pleasurable: a monumental sugar-rush of cinematic enjoyment.
In Kill Bill, Volume II, the Bride has put aside the yellow-and-black tracksuit, based on the outfit Bruce Lee wore in his unfinished film Game of Death, opting instead for more tactful civilian garb.
The project remains the same though: revenge, a dish gobbled up piping hot. She’s out to get her former lover Bill who, with his murderous minions, massacred her Groom and wedding guests and put her in a coma by ”busting a cap in her crown”. In Volume I, she took out O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) and Vernita Green (Vivica A Fox). Now she has the poisonous one-eyed killer Elle (Daryl Hannah) in her sights, along with Bill’s trailer-trash brother Budd (Michael Madsen) and finally the sinister kingpin Bill himself, played with lizardly charisma by David Carradine.
Everything happens in a weightless comic-book universe where the normal rules of physical existence have been abolished, or at any rate extensively modified. But it is brazenly played with the same unflinching naturalistic conviction. Carradine is the film’s triumph; his delayed, climactic appearance itself justifies the slicing of Kill Bill into two.
Delayed in a larger sense, too: despite a string of screen credits, this outstanding actor and natural star seems to have been in cold storage for 30 years since the days of the old Kung Fu TV show.
Now he shows up unannounced with his passive-aggressive Chinese flute at the Bride’s wedding. Bill is the spurned older lover, nursing a broken heart, chillingly calm and dangerous with a weird, lispy drawl. As he sits down in the congregation, and we all know the truth of what is about to happen, Robert Rodriguez’s musical score excels itself. Massively portentous chords blare out, like a bizarre cross between the Fistful of Dollars theme and Siegfried’s Funeral Music by Wagner.
There are plenty more horribly gripping scenes: the Bride is nailed into a coffin by the unspeakable Budd, who wants to bury her; the Bride’s sword-fight with Elle is conducted at close quarters in Budd’s manky caravan. But her encounter with Bill is a more a duel of words than blows.
So the Bride continues on her bloodthirsty way, a heroine with no love interest save for her bizarre, unexamined Electra complex, attached to a series of older men. How many other films whisk you around the world so exuberantly and persuade you that an action star should have a mastery, or at least respectful approach to, foreign languages: in this case Mandarin, Cantonese and Spanish?
Both instalments of Kill Bill have a pedal-to-the-metal exhilaration, sporting effortlessly with the texture and style of martial arts and action genres and making of them something vividly new, compulsively entertaining and exquisitely modern. — Â