Bloody mama Tarantino returns to form in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 BY PETER KEOUGH
	KillBill: Vol. 2 Directed and written by Quentin Tarantino. With Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, Gordon Liu, and Michael Parks. A Miramax Films release (136 minutes). At the Boston Common, the Fenway, the Harvard Square, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 demonstrated few of the virtues that made "Tarantino-esque" a buzz word for independent filmmaking; on the other hand, it indulged in most of the vices. Where was the wit, the irony, the masterful skill at skewing narrative and chronology, the playful manipulation of genre and allusion? Where, for crying out loud, was the dialogue? Vol. 1 offered the expected ultra-violence, the insider’s knowledge of tawdry film esoterica, the same shameless perversity, but none of the grace seen in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown. It wallowed in obsessions instead of themes: the brutal violence against women (often by women); the recurrent motif of children watching their parents’ graphic slaughter; a preoccupation with Uma Thurman’s feet.

Vol. 2 doesn’t redeem those excesses, but it does put them in a clarifying context (though Tarantino’s stab at feminism is still primitive and grotesque). A brash, brief opening black-and-white flashback recapitulates Vol. 1; we see the bloody, gasping face of Black Mamba, a/k/a "The Bride" (Uma Thurman), as Bill (David Carradine) is about to deliver the coup de grace. She was his main squeeze and hit woman until she left him to marry a nobody in Texas. So the unforgiving Bill orders the remaining members of his Deadly Viper Assassination Squad to kill the Bride and her entire wedding party. She survives, as does her unborn child, and she emerges from a coma years later. In ’50s b-movie glory, behind the wheel of a speeding sports car (with obvious rear-screen projection), she crows that she’s halfway through her "roaring rampage of revenge!"

So much for Vol. 1. Not that Tarantino cuts to the chase right away. Instead, "Chapter Six" looks at the wedding-party massacre from a different point of view. This time he alludes not to chopsocky potboilers or spaghetti-Western shoot-’em-ups but to John Ford. The white-clad Bride peers ruefully through the chapel door to the wilderness beyond, no doubt pondering her bartered freedom, and the image reverses Ethan Edwards’s looking in at the end of The Searchers. Then Bill’s off-screen bamboo flute lures her away to a tête-à-tête that makes their love/hate relationship not only comprehensible but more disturbing, and its furious resolution more than just an excuse for gore and self-gratification.

Vol. 2 meanders rather than belabors, yet by the end all the stray threads have snapped together with the authority of a noose. Two assassins remain: black-clad, one-eyed Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), known as California Mountain Snake, and Bill’s dissolute brother Budd (Michael Madsen, Mr. Blond from Reservoir Dogs, whose presence in the cast is a sign of Tarantino’s revival), the former Sidewinder. The Bride will get to them in due time. Meanwhile, Tarantino shows off his mastery of chronology, intertextuality, subjective point of view, and suspense. When his heroine is buried alive in one harrowing chapter, for example, he flashes back first to a campfire chat between Bill and the Bride in better times, then to her prolonged and bruising kung fu tutorship at the hands and feet of the august Pei Mei (Gordon Liu). Evoking films ranging from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to the Shaw Brothers’ Hong Kong classic Executioners from Shaolin, the sequence condenses years of character development and ill-fated love into a desperate few minutes of gasping and struggling in a sealed coffin.

Is Bill worth two volumes? It’s certainly worth one. Here it’s not just the improved dialogue (Madsen getting most of the best lines, though Michael Parks’s suave, septuagenarian Mexican pimp is a creation worthy of Jorge Luis Borges) but the renewed respect for life and death that gives each one of these killings a unique punch line and pathos. Bill’s inevitable death provides the biggest payoff of all.