Tarantino is very good at replicating the surface of the movies he loves. The opening black-and-white shots of Uma Thurman driving and addressing the camera have the phony rear projection and silvery luster of '40s noir. The outdoor shots in the scenes set in America have the crystal-clear views of vast vistas familiar from Leone and John Ford. The flashback where the Bride trains with a Chinese kung fu master (Gordon Liu) have the abrupt camera movements of Chinese martial-arts films and the graininess of prints that have been playing endlessly in dubbed versions on UHF TV stations for years.

It was during this section that the gap between what Tarantino intends and how his audience takes him became apparent. Clearly, for Tarantino, the movies he is aping here are objects of reverence (that he seems to revere nearly everything he's ever seen is another problem). But because he imitates his influences more than transforms them, they look, to his largely young audience, like some sort of knowing parody. The audience I saw "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" with laughed during the martial-arts training sequence because what they were looking at seemed indistinguishable to them from the junky movies they saw on Saturday-afternoon TV as kids.

Tarantino's movies don't raise any questions about our relation to our movie past. You can't imagine him asking himself, as directors like Coppola and Altman did in "The Godfather" films or "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," how we preserve what we love from our movie past while making them seem an expression of our own time. The message of Tarantino's movie is indiscriminate enthusiasm, where the junkiest B-movie exists on a par with a John Ford or a Leone western, where some slapped-together kung fu outing is the same as the best of King Hu or Tsui Hark.

When "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" came out, I was struck by the number of people who told me that they couldn't usually sit through violent movies but that they liked Tarantino. And of course it makes sense because, unlike Arthur Penn in "Bonnie and Clyde," unlike De Palma or Peckinpah, Scorsese in "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver," Coppola with "The Godfather" films, there are no moral ambiguities, no simultaneous sense of repulsion and rapture in Tarantino's violence. (I'd argue there isn't even the presence of movie-simplified notions of honor and duty that you find in John Woo's Hong Kong movies.) It's just a kick -- and if Tarantino has become a director of our time, part of it is because (with the exception of "Jackie Brown") he makes movies that are easy to slough off, in which all culture is ultimately disposable.

We know what it means, in "Breathless," when Belmondo pauses in front of a movie-lobby glossy of Humphrey Bogart. What does it mean in "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" that part of the story figures around the grave of a woman called Paula Schultz? Nothing, except that it's a reference to "The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz," a 1968 Cold War comedy starring the cast of "Hogan's Heroes." What does it mean that Bill names the truth serum he has devised the Undisputed Truth? Noting, except that it's a reference to the '70s soul band who had a hit with "Smiling Faces Sometimes." What does it mean that, as in "Vol. 1," the Bride's name is bleeped out on the soundtrack whenever anyone speaks it? Less than nothing, since the revelation of her real name doesn't spring some plot twist that had been kept hidden from us. It appears to be in there solely so that Tarantino can make a nod to the same device in Godard's "Made in USA."

After a while, "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" is like being on a tour bus. There's blaxploitation mainstay Sid Haig as a bartender. And there's Bo Svenson, whom Tarantino no doubt loved in "Part 2 Walking Tall," as a Texas preacher. Oh, and there's a poster for the Charles Bronson movie "Mr. Majestyk," which was based on an Elmore Leonard novel. The split screen is an homage to Brian De Palma. And the bit where Uma Thurman walks into the diner covered in dirt and blood? Yeah, that's a nod to "Freeway."

What does any of this finally add up to except that Quentin Tarantino has seen a lot of movies? And what does "Kill Bill" finally add up to? The final plot twist suggests that "Kill Bill" has enough of a premise for a 90-minute revenge movie. As the denouement of a nearly four-hour movie, it's not nearly enough. Perhaps it could have been if Tarantino had found some way to unify it all into a sweeping celebration (elegy?) for action cinema, the way, in "Once Upon a Time in the West," Leone makes you feel you're seeing the passing of a historical epoch and an entire movie genre. There's no doubt that "Kill Bill" is an epic, and no doubt of the skill that's often apparent. But what it leaves us with is awesomely trivial.

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