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Kill Bill, Vol.2

Movie Kill Bill, Vol.2 Director Quentin Tarantino Cast Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Darryl Hannah, Michael Madsen

By Subhash K Jha

What’s with this sublime spell of sequels that have fallen on us? 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 Vol.1 and its maddeningly murderous manoeuvres made us restless with repulsion, Vol 2 has a lot more creative energy secreted beneath its ongoing orgies of slurpy 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, are more on display here than ever before. Like the first volume, Vol 2 is intolerably 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 a threshold of 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. Underground, locked in a claustrophobic casket, Thurman brings to us a feeling of being cloistered and smothered from all ends. This ability to suck us into its irreversible savagery is a gift unique to Tarantino. This time he punctuates his binges of brutal, sometimes parodic barbarism with shocking 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 selfconscious 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 blizzard of agility is here more pronounced than it was in the first part. Thurman’s bridled 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. As a Japanese female assassin guns her way into Thurman’s home she hides behind a sofa and pleads with her adversary that she’s just discovered she’s in the family way. Then assassin murmers 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) that follows 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 Vol.1, though on this occasion the anger is often self-directed and consummated with repentance and apologies. At many points this violent conflict of painful vendetta and gratuitous self-redemption mixes mayhem with maudlinism. 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 is so pointedly potboiler-material you wonder how far the director is willing to go with his derringdo. But then you also wonder why our expectations from the film were raised to another level in the first place! Quentin Tarantino never intended this film to be anything but a freaked-out no-holds-barred tribute to the state-of-the-art vendetta films from the 1960s and 70s. All the signs and meanings that we read in the Kill Bill series are in our mind. But then, so is the unstoppered luxuriantly delineated violence. It’s all a state of the mind. Kill Bill exteriorizes man (and woman’s) most elemental pursuit of power obtained at gun point and by the edge of the sword. By doing so, it creates a world where Man and Woman no longer collide for sex, but for totally unproductive reasons.