"Kill Bill, Vol. 2"

Tarantino's talent can be dizzying, and Uma Thurman and David Carradine have great chemistry. But all it adds up to is that Q.T. seems to revere every movie he's ever seen.

By Charles Taylor

Apr 16, 2004 | Toward the end of "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" David Carradine delivers a speech that, like most seemingly aimless Quentin Tarantino monologues, meanders its way to its absurdist point. The subject is superheroes. Carradine's Bill is the mack daddy of a squad of (now-decimated) female assassins; the Bride (Uma Thurman) is hot on his trail -- he's the ultimate object of her quest for vengeance. In his speech, the coiled-snake son of a bitch says that his fave-rave superhero is Superman. Why? Because unlike Batman or Spider-Man, Superman's true identity is Superman -- it's nerdy Clark Kent that's the alter ego.

It's not hard to hear that speech as the closest we'll ever get to naked confession from Quentin Tarantino. When Tarantino goes into his hyperactive routine on late-night TV or on DVD extras -- playing the fanboy who revels in sleaze and who can pull more forgotten references out of the air than every issue of Cashbox and Psychotronic combined, the director who combs the streets of L.A. like a bloodhound to track down that character actor he loved in that forgotten TV show or grindhouse movie years back -- we're seeing a carefully constructed persona, the creation on which Tarantino has expended the most energy and time.

It's not that his enthusiasms aren't genuine. But there are two problems: Even at Tarantino's most entertaining, you're always aware of how much work has gone into putting together the genres and pop-culture references that dot his movies. They never have the feeling of something that just popped out of his brain; it's as if they've been planted with the sort of deliberateness that kills spontaneity. (At times, Tarantino seems as deliberate a filmmaker as Clint Eastwood, if nowhere near as plodding.)

But the bigger problem in sustaining our belief in the Tarantino persona is that -- once -- he let us see what was beneath the alter ego. In "Jackie Brown," to which I stupidly gave a middling review when I wrote about it for Salon in 1997, Tarantino winnowed his omnivorous pop-culture obsessions down to a manageable quartet -- Pam Grier, '70s soul, Robert Forster and Elmore Leonard novels. I should have realized that what he came up with was not only one of the great popular entertainments but also one of the most moving American pictures about the compromises of middle age.

On the "Jackie Brown" DVD, Tarantino calls it his Howard Hawks movie, and he's right. The film operates in the same spirit as Hawks' late masterpieces "Rio Bravo" and "Hatari!" Like those movies, "Jackie Brown" is nearly all talk, a series of beautifully written and played dialogue scenes that serve as subtle revelations of character. And the exquisite performances of Pam Grier and Robert Forster achieve the ease and conviction that, to borrow a phrase from the critic James Harvey about "Rio Bravo," seems less acting than pure behaving.

Perhaps because "Jackie Brown" was a critical and commercial disappointment, Tarantino chose to return to the role of trash connoisseur with a vengeance. It was obvious from just the first part of "Kill Bill" that Tarantino was cramming in as many genres and pop-culture references as he could. This was less a movie than a convention, a place to stroll down aisles and be reminded of junk artifacts you didn't know you knew.

Martial-arts movies and Hong Kong action movies were the hallmarks of "Vol. 1." In "Vol. 2" westerns have taken over, particularly the work of Sergio Leone. Selections by Leone's composer Ennio Morricone are all over the soundtrack. And "Vol. 2," set largely in Texas, California and Mexico, basks in wide landscapes and spare exchanges. Robert Richardson's cinematography mimics Leone's use of enormous close-ups, where the iconography of a face overpowers the iconography of the landscape.

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