Watching Kill Bill Vol. 2, one is reminded of a passage from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in which the narrator talks to a professor about the cartographers of his country. In their quest for greater accuracy and detail, the cartographers make maps with increasingly smaller ratios of scale, until finally they create a map with a 1:1 ratio. The farmers object, saying it would block out the sun, and so the map is never used. In making Kill Bill Vol. 2, Quentin Tarantino made the same mistake as the map-makers: By trying to make his characters larger than life, he burdened the vision of his movie as a re-working of vintage kung-fu movies' violent chic.
Quentin Tarantino's trademark as a writer, if he has one, is the clever and seemingly irrelevant side-dialogue that fills his move. It could be well-argued that the most enjoyable aspect of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction is not the stylized, over-the-top violence -- which is surely not unique to Tarantino's own work -- but rather the representation of the characters' free time: their conversations about foot massages or Madonna lyrics that provide a temporary mental diversion for men who have committed their lives to violence and crime. These moments are rare to other contemporary action films but are very effective in Tarantino's work, emphasizing humanity amidst moments of extreme carnage and wanton immorality.
The downbeat conversations and the extreme violence are both still present in Kill Bill Vol. 2, but they're not quite the same as in the first volume. The lightning fast pace and highly choreographed fight scenes of Vol.1 are nowhere to be found in the second installment, which in their place substitutes lengthy scenes in which the characters talk at great length about the wrongs they have committed in their lives.
The prequel was a breathless exercise in movie style, as the reformed assassin known only as The Bride (Uma Thurman) was shot and left for dead at her wedding by the members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and their leader, Bill (David Carradine). Coming out of a coma four years later, she makes it her personal mission to kill all the members of the Squad and, as the name of the films implies, to kill Bill. The plot remains unchanged in the Vol. 2 (the Bride is still trying to kill Bill), but the mood, pacing,and style have all undergone drastic changes.
Those who saw the first volume of Kill Bill and are looking for more of the same from the second installment will be sorely disappointed. There are the patented Tarantino moments of violent absurdism, but they occur much less frequently (although this scarcity does give the few violent scenes a greater visceral impact than that of the non-stop barrage in Vol. 1).
Oddly enough, I didn't consider Vol 1 to be overly brutal when I first saw it; at the time, I felt as though it was a great action movie that might have erred slightly by over-homogenization. Now, having seen both volumes, Vol. 1 feels as though it was simply cinematic sleight-of-hand. The dizzying action sequences and too-cool visual stylings were simply used by Tarantino to divert our attention away from the fact that the "characters" in the film are little more than feeble caricatures, finding whatever strength they might have only in the audience's ability to impart emotions remembered from other films with similar, more fully-realized characters. It's difficult, if not impossible, to find empathy for characters that have spent the majority of their screen time mercilessly slaughtering other characters.
And therein lies the problem with Tarantino's great cinematic house of cards; he has proven that he can create a visually successful Frankensteinian pastiche of past film genres, but it's doubtful that his creation really has a soul of its own.
If Tarantino hopes to have success in the future, he should take a few lessons from Carroll's cartographers. When they were forced to shelve their 1:1 map, they had to decide upon another map to use. Rather than burdening the land by blocking out the sun, they let their drawings fade back a bit into simulacrum and abstraction. In the context he is currently working in, Tarantino needs to avoid burdening his films with detailed sketches of characters who are really not very deep at all.
It has also become apparent that Tarantino's system of re-appropriating older films to provide fodder for his own works can no longer work. It has become such that his new films cannibalize themselves as they're being made. If Tarantino wants to be successful in the future, he's going to have to produce something that actually comes from within.
