Kill Bill: Volume 2 Review

The second half inverts the first on purpose. The swords mostly stay sheathed, the palette shifts from Tokyo neon to Texas dust and Mexican sun, and Tarantino finally lets his people talk. David Carradine was a strange piece of casting that turns out to be the film's whole argument, a soft voiced old man who can make a speech about Superman sound like a genuine reading of the person in front of him. The burial sequence is the best pure suspense in either volume, and the Pai Mei training flashback earns its length by explaining a punch you have been waiting two films to see.

Michael Madsen gets the saddest stretch of screen time, a killer reduced to bouncing at a strip club, and then the film disposes of him with a shrug that feels like an unfinished thought. The ending is a conversation, which will disappoint anyone the first volume trained to expect carnage, and Daryl Hannah's exit is played for a laugh the character has not earned. Even so, this is the volume with a heart in it.