Writer-director Quentin Tarantino completes the quest for revenge in KILL BILL, VOL. 1, as The Bride (Uma Thurman) crosses the final names off her death list.
M**G
And the series comes to a close
According to IMBD, on Kill Bill Volume 2 (For Information Purposes), During the opening credits, we see the Bride's bloodied face again and hear her say "Bill, it's your baby." In the first scene, we see her driving an open car and saying that there is only one left to kill (which answers the question whether she believed that Elle died). She is on her way to Bill.Chapter 6: The Massacre at Two PinesBack at the beginning (a black-and-white segment), at the Two Pines Wedding Chapel in El Paso, TX, a dress rehearsal for a wedding is taking place. Reverend Harmony (Bo Svenson) and his wife (Jeannie Epper) decide that, since the bride will have no relatives present at the wedding, the groom's relatives and friends can sit on both sides of the aisle. The Bride (Uma Thurman) leaves the chapel to get some fresh air; on the way out, she is disturbed to hear flute music. On the front porch she finds Bill (David Carradine) sitting on a bench playing his bamboo flute. She asks him to be nice and he replies that he does not know how to be nice but will do his best to be sweet. They enter the hall and she introduces Bill to her fiancé as her father but rejects the fiancé's idea that, as her father, he should give her away at the ceremony. As the bride and groom are called to the front by the Reverend Harmony, no attempt is made to introduce 'father' to the rest of the fiancé's family. Bill stays at the back of the chapel.Outside the chapel, four armed assassins appear, all dressed in black. In one line they move to the door, they enter, and the shooting starts, killing everybody inside except for the Bride and Bill.Back in the present (in color), Bill visits his younger brother Budd (Michael Madsen), a.k.a. Sidewinder, at his trailer in the middle of nowhere and warns him about the Bride. She will kill Budd if Budd does not allow Bill to protect him. They had differences in the past but they should move on. Budd, drinking as they talk, replies that maybe they should get killed because the Bride deserves her revenge. He then infuriates Bill by saying that he pawned his priceless samurai sword (a gift from Bill) for $250.Chapter 7: The Lonely Grave of Paula SchulzBudd goes to work. He works as a bouncer in a local strip club. He arrives 20 minutes late and sees that there are no customers in the club. He talks briefly with the bartender, Jay, before he is called into the office by his hot-tempered, coke-snorting boss Larry Gomez. In the office, Larry argues with Budd over being late again, and Budd talks back, saying that there is nobody in the bar & there was no need for him to be there. Larry takes away all Budd's scheduled hours and tells him in a rude tone not to come back to work until he hears from him. In the bar, Budd agrees to clean up after a broken toilet that a stripper named Rockets says is overflowing.Budd returns to his trailer but standing in front of it suddenly freezes. He enters the trailer but looks out the window. The Bride, who was hiding under the trailer, sticks to the wall so he does not see her. When she opens the door Budd shoots her in the chest with a shotgun loaded with rock salt. While she lies wounded on the ground, Budd is very pleased with himself and injects her with a sedative. He phones Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) and offers to sell her the Bride's Hattori Hanzo sword for a million dollars. Elle agrees to bring the money in the morning. Her condition is that the Bride must die and suffer to her last breath.Budd and an accomplice of his dig a large hole in the ground at a local cemetery to bury the wounded Bride alive. When the grave has been dug, the Bride is given a choice: if she does not resist, she'll be given a flashlight; if she does, Budd will burn out her eyes with mace and leave her buried alive in darkness. She chooses the flashlight, is put in a coffin and the lid is nailed down. Budd and his accomplice lower the coffin into the ground and cover it with soil. The Bride panics for a short time and recalls her training under Pai Mei.Chapter 8: The Cruel Tutelage of Pai MeiIn a flashback, Bill and the Bride (very much in love with him) sit by a campfire somewhere in China and Bill, who calls her "kiddo," plays his flute. He tells her about his kung fu teacher Pai Mei (Chia Hui Liu, credited as Gordon Liu) and his 'five-point-palm-exploding-heart technique.' The technique involves five blows administered to particular pressure points on the body. Thereafter, the victim's heart explodes after he or she takes five steps. Pai Mei did not teach Bill the technique because he does not show it to anyone.At the foot of the steps leading to Pai Mei's place in another part of rural China, Bill, who has just come down, informs the Bride that Pai Mei will take her as his pupil because he is lonely. Bill's bruised face shows that he was hurt but he refuses to say what happened. Bill warns her not to show any disrespect or disobedience to Pai Mei because Pai Mei will kill her -- "he hates Caucasians, despises Americans, and has nothing but contempt for women." She climbs the steps and quickly is humiliated by Pai Mei, who scorns her fighting skills and her ethnicity. He challenges her to land one blow on him while they engage in hand-to-hand combat and the Bride fails. Pai Mei threatens to chop her hand off with a single blow and declares that her hand belongs to him and she must strengthen it. Over the next several weeks, the Bride works hard (practicing martial arts forms and bringing buckets of water up the steps) and learns hard. She finds striking a blow with her fist to break a hole through a thick wooden plank at close range the most difficult skill.Back to the present. Still inside the coffin, the Bride manages to remove her boots and the belt tying her feet together. She takes out a straight razor hidden in her boot and uses it to cut her hands free. She hits the coffin lid with her fist repeatedly. The lid becomes smeared with her blood but it finally cracks. She appears to swim up through the earth, and an arm emerges from the grave. The Bride crawls out. Covered in dirt, she walks into a diner, sits down and calmly asks for a glass of water.Chapter 9: Elle and IThe Bride walks a great distance across the desert and through the mountains. She reaches Budd's trailer in time to see Elle arrive.Elle enters the trailer and gives Budd a red suitcase full of money. He makes margaritas in a grubby blender and serves them in dirty jelly-jar glasses while she examines the sword. He opens the suitcase, gloats over the money, and is struck in the face by a venomous black mamba snake that was hidden among the bundles of cash. Before he dies, Elle tells him that she is sorry that such a "piece of shit" as himself was the one who managed to kill the Bride -- she deserved better. She phones Bill and tells him that the Bride has killed his brother but that she, Elle, has killed the Bride. Elle also reveals the whereabouts of the final resting place of the Bride (in the grave of Paula Schulz) and mentions the Bride's real name for the first time: Beatrix Kiddo.Beatrix walks in and immediately attacks Elle. Their long and vicious fight destroys the trailer's interior. In a lull in the hostilities, Beatrix asks Elle how she lost her eye and Elle says that Pai Mei ripped it out because she offended him. Elle tells Beatrix that she poisoned Pai Mei in revenge and he died. They continue to fight and Elle gets hold of the Bride's sword. In a golf bag, the Bride finds another katana, inscribed "To my brother Budd, the only man I ever loved, Bill" -- apparently Budd did not sell it after all. As they face off, Elle relishes the irony of killing the Bride with her own sword. However, at close range, the Bride plucks out Elle's remaining eye and steps on it. Rather than finish killing Elle, Beatrix leaves the trailer, the black mamba hissing behind her as Elle shrieks and curses and flails.Last Chapter: Face to FaceIn Mexico, the Bride visits the courtly retired pimp Esteban Vihaio (Michael Parks), Bill's old mentor, and asks him to tell her where Bill is. He finally agrees because he thinks Bill would surely like to see her.She enters Bill's hacienda carefully, a gun in her hand, but is shocked to the point of tears when Bill and their small daughter B.B. (Perla Haney-Jardine), alive, both play-shoot at her with toy guns. She spends good time with her daughter, who falls asleep. The Bride goes to speak to Bill.Bill's warning shot pins Beatrix down in her seat, then he shoots her with a truth-serum dart. She explains why she left him: because she wanted to keep their child safe, not wanting her to grow up to be assassins like them.Flashback to a hotel room: the Bride, who's been sent on an assassination assignment to Japan, discovers that she is pregnant. Another assassin, Karen Kim (Helen Kim), shoots a hole in the door with a shotgun. The Bride, pointing her gun at Karen, convinces her that she is pregnant and persuades her to walk away, promising that she will do the same. As she leaves, Karen congratulates the Bride.Back in the present, Bill is puzzled because he believes that Beatrix is a natural born killer and could not change. He asks if she enjoyed killing the other people on her revenge list, and the truth serum forces her to admit that she did. They agree to fight with swords on the beach -- then Bill suddenly attacks her as they sit on his patio. At the climax of a brief skirmish during which both remain seated, she strikes him with the five-point-palm-exploding-heart technique. She tells Bill that she did not mention that Pai Mei taught her the technique because she is a bad person. Bill disputes that. They share an affectionate farewell before he takes five steps and falls down dead.Beatrix takes her daughter away to start a new life: "The lioness has rejoined her cub, and all is right in the jungle."
B**S
The Greatest of the Great Bard's Tales
If, in 'Volume 1', Quentin Tarantino made one of the best movies for people who love Japanese grindhouse, then in 'Volume 2' he made one of the best movies for people who love movies. Tarantino is just about the most unerring director I've seen. He has never made a film that was less than Very Good, and 'Kill Bill Vol. 2' is the greatest of all his films to date. This isn't a sequel to 'Vol. 1', as he didn't decide to split 'Kill Bill' up until just after he finished shooting, it's simply the second half. 'Vol. 1' is an excellent, excellent film, but no where in the range of this one. I grin ear-to-ear all the way through this movie.This is Quentin's most visually beautiful movie yet (and the magnificent opening chapter in the chapel, shot in gleaming black-and-white, is profoundly resplendent, as is the great sequence at Pai Mei's ancient abode, shot in gloriously seventies-style over-saturated greens and glaring whites), and it's where his flair for spaghetti-Westerns comes out the most; the majority of the movie is vintage Wild West. As in all of Tarantino's films, the dialogue is an unadulterated joy, and there's actually relatively little of it here, nearly all of it spoken slowly and ponderously, much of it philosophically, as befits a movie with this Western setting. The way the characters each savor and weigh their words is one of the best aspects of the film; Quentin has never written dialogue as lastingly satisfying as this.In a beautiful scene that grins at us with delight (as is Tarantino's wont), the Bride tracks down a father-figure of Bill's to learn his location, and he tells her a story about taking him to a movie as a little boy, at which he learned what type of women Bill 'was a fool for', even at that age. We learn from this brief story the fancy Bill always had that first attracted him to the Bride long before the 'Kill Bill' story began. Where so many movies would give us a disturbing childhood story explaining how the villain became that way, Quentin gives us one about a likable, positive trait that reminds us of his humanity, just before our heroine confronts him.'Vol. 2' is nearly his least violent film yet, and I've read both the original script and David Carradine's 'The Kill Bill Diaries', about all he saw of the making of the movies, and it's clear that many of Quentin's best decisions had to do with diminishing or removing the action. In place of the more obvious strategy of showing us a detailed sequence of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad gruesomely gunning down the people in the chapel, he decided no, pull back and let us just listen to a brief event from a distance, observing it in a kind of silhouette. And in place of Bill firing a warning shot at the Bride and holding her at gun-point while she walks towards a couch to seat herself, he decided Bill simply regards her casually, his pistol just visible at his waist, of which they are both aware. In the earlier idea, all suspense would have been spent with the warning shot. When Bill relates the tale of Pai Mei to the Bride, he decided it would be more effective to let us use our imaginations while listening to Bill's ponderous speech by the camp-fire in the dark than to play seventies Kung Fu footage of Pai Mei in action over the monologue.The first time I saw the movie, the first big thing that struck me was Budd, one of the Bride's three remaining targets. His is a great and tragic character, and Michael Madsen is a great actor. His performance begins in a singularly perfect scene with Carradine which shows us his indifference to, and acceptance of, his approaching probable demise. And for a long stretch the Bride is forgotten, and we simply follow Budd into the lonely strip club he tends bar at, getting a taste of what his existence has become, of his disappointment and withdrawal from life (the scene where he argues with his boss Larry and finally relinquishes both his hat and his pride is worthy of applause). Every time I watch the scene of the Bride's sneak-attack on him, I am more amazed by how exquisitely constructed the whole sequence is. A long, meticulous build-up ending in unexpected truncation is a trade-mark of Quentin's, in activity as well as dialogue. What Budd does with the Bride is endlessly fascinating to me in its brilliant, terrifying, primeval simplicity. This is the stuff of great myths.A while ago I realized I can't truly cherish movies, even great ones, that zip right along, whose scenes each seem to exist mostly to set the next scene up. 'Vol. 2', and for that matter, all of Quentin's movies, allow us to inhabit its scenes' settings, their situations, their characters, their moods. The scenes in this movie are each genuine, distinct places to me. Discussing his 'Jackie Brown', Tarantino said that for a film to last beyond its theatrical run, its scenes need to have substance in themselves and can't only be about that specific film's plot, as you pretty much get that the first time around. He said people often wonder why 'Jackie' has so many 'hang-around' scenes, in which the characters just hang around and talk to each other - scenes about the characters, about great dialogue. He believes those are crucial in bringing people back to a film for the sixth, the seventh, the fiftieth times. What happens when Elle visits Budd when all seems to be finished? They hang out for a while. What basically happens for most of the Bride's stay at Bill's residence? They hang out.In the last chapter the tone of the film changes from the grandiose, Tarantinian adventure of the first four chapters - in which almost godlike characters imprison, and barter, and betray, and apprentice, and battle each other, and do great deeds, and in which much depends on who possesses the Bride's unequalled Hanzo sword - and settles into an intimate dialogue between the story's two central characters (and one other, for a time), in which Quentin subtly and expertly simmers the tension and danger that exists between these two supremely deadly assassins. This section of the film is in keeping with an other trade-mark of Quentin's, that of inserting elements of simplest, uttermost reality into an over-the-top, epic story. With Quentin's help, David Carradine produced a deliriously great performance in this film, as a man who is possibly even more laid-back than Carradine was himself, but who can be deeply, genuinely menacing. In the last chapter, he delivers two of the movie's best speeches, one about the death of a goldfish, the other about his favorite superhero.'Kill Bill Vol. 2' is the most joyful, the most exciting, the most glorious celebration of the cinema I've ever seen. It is Tarantino's deepest and most emotionally powerful film by far (and the often over-looked sequence of the Bride slowly preparing herself before leaving a bed-room to face Bill is one of the very best in the film) and during an autoexcavation it has one of the very best uses of music I've heard in a movie. The climax of the Bride's raggedly magnificent confrontation with her wicked rival Elle evokes in me the emotion of sheer love. And the scene of the Bride's triumph over the designs of Budd has become one of my central images of the cinema. This film is a human object and it radiates its director's signature passion and love of the movies. Roger Ebert once said that 'The Third Man' is 'the film that most perfectly embodies the romance of going to the movies', or it is for him at least. For me, it's this one.
S**E
It's an upgrade from the normal 1080P Blu-ray.
This is an upgrade from the 1080P Blu-ray version for sure with better colors, better contrast, & better highlights. It's Dolby Vision so that's why it looks so good. The audio sounds great as well but I don't have a Dolby Atmos setup so I can't say anything about that but it's very clear with some great bass in some scenes. The movie is what it is, love it or hate it that's up to you but I enjoyed them for what they are. Definitely worthwhile to have in my collection.And yes, the standard 4K copies come with a slipcover. I had to add that since I really couldn't find a yes or no to this so there ya go.
D**N
100 percent satisfaction
Enjoyed the movie 100 satisfaction
R**S
Kill Bill vol. 2 4K
I really enjoy this 4K Movie
A**S
Kill bill vol 2
This the end of kill bill movie and like other one this is good ending and 4k doesn’t disappoint
R**R
Like Volume 1, the upgrade from HD is small.
Like Kill Bill Volume 1, Volume 2 was finished by the filmmaker in 2K so no native 4K master exists. Thus, they had to upconvert the movie from 2K. As a result the increase in detail is very small, but the addition of HDR does help. Since they only had so much to work with so the overall improvement over the HD Blu-ray is tiny compared to most discs. I truly LOVE this movie so incredibly much it was worth the expense to me for such a tiny improvement. I know most people will be disappointed with this disc compared to MOST 4K discs, but they did all they could with what they had to work with. If you don't already own Kill Bill Volume 2 this is worth getting, but if you already own it on HD Blu-ray it's a tougher call to make whether it's worth the investment for the small improvement. I recommend it, but only with the previously mentioned caveat.
K**S
Have to see
Play very well
Trustpilot
2 days ago
1 week ago