By the standards of film themes, revenge plots are pretty simple. You've seen the film dozens of times: hero loses everything to Nefarious Evil-Doer(s), hero trains in (insert exotic path to vengeance), then sets out to kill all those who wronged them and theirs. Its been done zillions of times, from Death Wish and Ms. 45, to Walking Tall and endless seas of Kung Fu flicks where a student must avenge their master.
I'm not one to deride people for using an un-original idea...well, not always, anyway. The fact is, revenge plots work because people like to see people get their comeuppance. Particularly bad people.
In that respect, the first part of Kill Bill worked flawlessly. The heroine of the tale, The Bride (Uma Thurman) was a woman clearly wronged, betrayed by those who had supposedly cared about her, her husband-to-be murdered whilst she was pregnant and left for dead. She has every reason to want to take out her former team-mates in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. And so, as the tale of Part 2 begins, two of the five are dead, and she heads off to take on target number three, Sidewinder (Michael Madsen).
Of course, before we get there, we need a bit over 30 minutes of exposition. Easily the weak link in the film, way too much back-story is exposed in the first act of this film. While generally entertaining, it does drag due to the break in action.
From there, the movie moves on full-tilt, as the action moves from Sidewinder to California Mountain Snake (Darryl Hannah), back and forth. Consistently subverting the audiences' expectations in the trademark way of writer/director Quentin Tarantino, little goes the way the viewer might predict, from the results of the initial confrontation between The Bride and Sidewinder and the fallout from that confrontation, to the ultimate fate of the vipers (I think its obvious they die; its the how that is pretty surprising and entertaining), to the manner in which The Bride pursues Bill (David Carradine), and what happens once they meet...well, the movie threw some intriguing twists at me, and, jaded though I may be, found them to mostly be in the "cool" category. And the ending, at least in my opinion, was worth the journey.
While the film contains much less fighting than the first part, the stellar fight choreography, courtesy of Yuen Wo-Ping, is as stylish and intense as ever, and Tarantino's use of jump-cuts and melodramatic over-tones suit the film nicely.
The dialogue is, as befits a revenge flick, minimal, heavily plot-driven, and mired in cliches. There are some solid one-liners, and some deliberately ironic dialogue that hits more than it misses; make no mistake, this film is hardly a witty banter-filled joke fest. It is all about action, and mostly, it delivers. The characters are at least credibly within the suspension of disbelieve, even if the characters are stereotypes of melodrama.
The acting is constitently well done, with Uma Thurman and Michael Madsen's roles particularly well acted. The characters aren't very dramatically subtle, but the actors suit the parts well.
While somewhat the inferior of Part 1, Kill Bill Part 2 is still quite an entertaining flick, if not terribly deep. The action is quite a bit of fun, and the plot, while perhaps not very original, is at the least engaging. Definitely worth the price of admission for fans of Part 1, or Kung Fu flicks in general.
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