Kill Bill Vol. 2

Three months after slogging through Quentin Tarantino's interminable Scene-It game known as Kill Bill Vol. 1, I finally worked up the guts to check out the second installment. And whadaya know, it's a completely different movie. Whereas Kill Bill Vol. 1 was obnoxious, self-indulgent and stupid, Kill Bil Vol. 2 is obnoxious, self-indulgent, stupid and painfully overlong! Bonza!

The film picks up where the original left off. The Bride (Uma Thurman) is still out for revenge, and is gunning for the three remaining assassins responsible for the rude interruption of her wedding: Budd (Michael Madsen), Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) and, of course, Bill (David Carradine). There are also flashbacks to her wedding, her training with Chinese kung fu master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu), etc., but who really cares? Not I, said the fly.

Most of what you loved or hated about Kill Bill Vol. 1 is present in the sequel: the garishly over-the-top, gore-soaked violence, the deliberately cheesy dialogue, the obnoxious homages to Spaghetti Westerns and Kung Fu flicks, and shots of Uma Thurman's feet. What's added, however, is a terrible pace. The movie features odd and inappropriate flashbacks that contribute nothing to the story (see Budd get fired from his job! See the Bride's pregnancy test!). And then we get to the finale, which consists of the Bride and Bill yammering on about Superman for about forty minutes straight. Some of you might find that cool. I find it tiresome.

Supposedly more plot-heavy, character-driven and "mature" than its predecessor, Kill Bill Vol. 2 is, if anything, even more ridiculous. Besides wasting our time with pointless digressions and Billy Jack-level dialogue, Tarantino gives us an utterly mean-spirited piece of drek that resorts to cartoonishness, toilet humor and gratuitous gore to keep things interesting. Everything is technically competent, but to what end?

You can play the satire or homage card if you like, but you won't get anywhere with me. That the movie is deliberately over-the-top just adds insult to injury: it smacks of calculated contempt for the audience, an acknowledgment by Mr. Tarantino that his goal is puerile cinematic masturbation, ejaculating his fantasies all over the screen and calling it art.

Let's get a few things straight here: It's okay to have a non-linear storyline if the non-linear-ness serves a purpose. It's okay if you use homages that are organic to the material, not if they exist to call attention to your DVD collection. It's okay to use "borrowed" music, but it's less acceptable to shoehorn pieces from A Professional Gun and A Fistful of Dollars into scenes that don't warrant their use. (I will concede that a piece from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is very well placed.) It's okay to be slow-paced and talky if the talk is interesting; if not, you're just boring the audience.

If that was your goal, Mr. Tarantino, then mission accomplished. If not, you suck.

Uma Thurman continues her fine performance as the Bride, while the late David Carradine gets by on sheer charisma and screen presence. Michael Madsen and Daryl Hannah have much more to do than in the original, and come off reasonably well. Gordon Liu is funny, even if his beard-stroking schtick gets tiresome real fast. We have good actors doing excellent work with awful material; why couldn't Mr. Tarantino have given them something worthwhile?

What more can I say about the Kill Bill films? Well, I didn't pay any money to see them, so I can't claim any indignance on that score. I could weep over the four-and-a-half hours lost, but I'm the master of wasting time so I'd have no leg to stand on. Maybe, after all this negativity, I ought to say something nice?

Okay: It wasn't Transformers.