"Kill Bill, Vol. 2"

The film is paced like a western, slow and deliberate. Maybe because it's not one action scene after another, it doesn't fall into the tedium that "Vol. 1" did (even though it's a half-hour longer). Some of the studied laconicism works, particularly in the two encounters between Bill and the Bride that bookend the movie. The first is a flashback to the wedding-chapel massacre where Bill and his hit squad left the pregnant Bride for dead and murdered her groom and wedding party. The second is their final encounter when the Bride has finally tracked Bill down.

Thurman and Carradine are awfully good together. They capture the connection that exists between deadly foes, the knowledge that neither can hide from the other. There's wit and a spacy yet exact sense of timing in Carradine's aging stoner delivery, and he's one of those performers who looks better with the lines of age on his face. Uma Thurman is used more as Tarantino's muse and as a (terrific) camera object. But she knows the expression a performer can bring to a modeling job. She has a leonine quality here, and there's a febrile sense of controlled rage in the slowness of her limbs before she executes some martial-arts move. And when you see Carradine and Thurman facing each other in profile, you know exactly why Tarantino wanted to put them together. They both have the same lanky, American frame, the same sense of sly underplaying.

How well these two match up is at the heart of what I think is the one genuinely subversive twist in the movie. Tarantino knows that we're expecting a huge confrontation when Bill and the Bride finally meet again (the picture is called "Kill Bill," after all). And he gives it to us -- but in words rather than in physical action. We recognize the climax on the rebound; it happened while we were waiting for the ultimate fight sequence. The way Tarantino throws away what could have been a predictable finish by choosing to emphasize character and performance over spectacle is a sly rebuke to what passes for craftsmanship in mainstream movies where final confrontations are simply excuses for elaborate special effects and multiple endings.

It might surprise some people that the violence in "Vol. 2" is relatively discreet. When assassins charge into the church to kill the Bride and her wedding party, the camera stays outside. But there are scenes with Tarantino's unfortunate taste for sadism, particularly the confrontation between the Bride and Daryl Hannah's one-eyed Elle Driver. (It's hard to get people who don't like action movies to understand that what audiences are responding to in most of them is not physical violence but the kinetic thrill of speed and movement. In Tarantino, though, the emphasis has always been on physical pain.)

Still, for all the craft that's gone into "Kill Bill, Vol. 2," despite the chance Tarantino has taken in departing from the wham-bam movement of the first half, my final reaction to the movie is, so what?

There's no shame in having a taste for trash, particularly if you're an American director. Our national film heritage is largely based on genre films -- screwball comedies, film noir, westerns, melodrama, gangster movies, musicals. And you don't even have to aim as high as the best of any of those genres to see the attraction of the trashy exploitation and martial-arts movies Tarantino is drawn to.

But Tarantino doesn't poeticize his fixation on American pulp (as the French nouvelle vague directors did). He doesn't use the hokiest conventions and make them seem free of calculation, imbued only with the desire to please an audience, as the best Hong Kong filmmakers have done. He doesn't give the emotional or mythic weight to the faces that appear before his camera in the way that Sergio Leone did. The faces in Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" are familiar to any moviegoer -- Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Woody Strode, Jack Elam. And yet Leone makes you feel as if they have welled up out of the collective unconsciousness of our (real and imagined) past -- or at least as if they'd just descended from Mt. Rushmore.

Next Page: Tarantino seems to revere nearly every movie he's ever seen

• View blog reactions