KILL BILL: Volume 2 I have to admit that I was one of those people who, upon hearing last year of Miramax and Quentin Tarantino’s decision to release his long awaited film "KILL BILL" in two parts, thought I smelled disaster. After all, the movie must be an overly long, self-indulgent flop if they couldn’t edit it down to a reasonable size, right? Well, "KILL BILL: Volume 1" arrived last year and while it was short on plot, character development and Tarantino’s signature snappy dialogue the action scenes and the visuals were so overwhelming that I liked it in spite of myself. But still I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and for "KILL BILL: Volume 2" to be a disaster. Well, I saw "KILL BILL: Volume 2" over the weekend and all I can say is THIS MOVIE ROCKS. In fact, it is so good that it makes "KILL BILL: Volume 1" seem even better. To refresh everyone’s memory, "KILL BILL" is the story of a character known only as "The Bride" (played by Uma Thurman) who was gunned down on her wedding day along with her entire wedding party. The film’s action begins when the Bride awakens from the coma she was left in after the attack and sets about extracting her revenge on the attackers, a professional hit squad of which she was a member called the DiVAs (the Deadly Vipers Assassination Squad) and her ex-lover, and leader of the DiVAs – Bill. In "Volume 1" the Bride killed the first two people on her list, and now in "Volume 2" she comes back to get the rest of the squad: Bill’s Texas trailer-dwelling brother Budd (played to seedy and terrifying perfection by Michael Madsen), Elle (Darryl Hannah) and finally, Bill himself. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot here but the film is full of amazing and terrifying swordfights, premature burials, poison snakes, gunfights, and wonderful conversation. While the first film was a bit light on character development, this film explores a lot of the history among these characters, revealing not only how the Bride (whose real name is revealed in this film, but I won’t tell) came to be such an expert assassin but how she came to be in the Texas church where the massacre took place. I can’t say any of this makes the Bride a particularly nice character – it is clear that she is and was just as ruthless and unrepentant as her enemies – but it adds a lot of dimension to the characterization. And Tarantino observes the cardinal rule of revenge flicks – the bad guys get killed in hierarchical order. This film is a must see – particularly for the loving way that Tarantino has embraced all the clichés and glories of "revenge films" and the Hong Kong action movies he adores. It is clear even in the locations he chooses – the deserts of Texas, the coast of Mexico, a snow covered garden in Tokyo – that this film is an homage to the epic traditions of cinema. While so many movies now feel like throw-aways, "KILL BILL" feels like it was made by a mastercraftsman, with love. See it. NOW!!!! April Roberts ~ aroberts310@nyc.rr.com http://killbill.movies.go.com