Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
★★★★ — Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
Please, Quentin. Make Kill Bill Vol. 3. I'm begging you.
I love this franchise deeply, and I've said as much when I wrote about Kill Bill: Vol. 1, but the two films are doing completely different things, and it's worth being honest about that rather than just lumping them together. The first one is a full-throttle, blood-soaked rampage. It's outrageous and exhilarating and wears its influences on its sleeve like a badge of honour. Vol. 2, though? Vol. 2 slows down, leans in close, and twists the knife. And I mean that as a compliment.
If the first film was Tarantino's love letter to Asian action cinema, all anime sequences and samurai swords and screaming yellow tracksuits, then Vol. 2 is his Western. It's dusty and deliberate. It breathes. There are long silences where Vol. 1 had arterial sprays. And that shift takes some getting used to, especially if you've come in still buzzing from the Crazy 88. But once you settle into its rhythm, it gets under your skin in a way the first film never quite manages.
And then there's that finale. My god. David Carradine owns every single second of screen time he's given here. His Bill is magnetic in the most unsettling way, charming and dangerous, the kind of man who delivers quiet menace through a smile and a measured sentence. The monologue he delivers near the end is extraordinary. It shouldn't work as well as it does, this long, philosophical speech in the middle of what could have been a straightforward showdown, but it absolutely does. Because Carradine makes you believe every word of it.
And just when you're braced for an explosion, for the carnage you've been half-expecting since Vol. 1, Ennio Morricone steps in. That score lifts the whole sequence into something almost operatic. It's not a sword fight. It's not a bloodbath. It's a conversation, a reckoning, a death that carries genuine emotional weight. I wasn't expecting to feel that much at the end of a Kill Bill film, and the fact that I did says everything about what Vol. 2 is quietly pulling off beneath the surface.
It's not as relentlessly entertaining as the first one, and I won't pretend otherwise. There are stretches where the pacing asks quite a lot of your patience. But the payoff earns that patience, and the film as a whole feels like the more complete piece of work. Vol. 1 is the spectacle. Vol. 2 is the substance. You need both, and together they form something genuinely special in Tarantino's catalogue, which, if you've read my thoughts on Pulp Fiction or Inglourious Basterds (2009), you'll know is not something I say lightly.
But here's what keeps nagging at me. There's unfinished business. Cottonmouth's daughter is out there, and she knows what happened to her mother. That's a loaded gun sitting on the table, and every storytelling instinct says it has to go off eventually. The idea of Tarantino closing out his directing career with a Vol. 3, one final roar of vengeance, feels so right it almost hurts that it hasn't happened yet. It would be the perfect full stop to everything he's built.
So come on, Quentin. One more. Four stars.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2004 | Watched: 2007-03-03
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Quentin Tarantino: Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019) · Inglourious Basterds (2009) · Pulp Fiction (1994) · Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
More with Uma Thurman: Pulp Fiction (1994) · Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
