All the glowing reviews for the four-hour-and-forty-one minute version of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill — originally released as two separate films in 2003 and 2004 — are a sickening read if you actually go and see the damn thing, now titled Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. So little is changed, it’s shocking. It’s essentially the first two installments stuck together with a fifteen-minute intermission in between, an effect you could achieve at home by simply watching both films with a long bathroom break in between.
In case you need a reminder, Kill Bill is the saga of a top assassin named Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman) who emerges from a four-year coma and seeks protracted, gory revenge on her former mentor-lover Bill (David Carradine) and the hit squad who nearly killed her.
When Beatrix finally awakens, it seems she’s also lost the baby she had been carrying. This is yet another vital reason that, in the list of revenge killings she plans to do, written down neatly in a notebook, she puts the death of the baby’s actual father last after the planned murders of hit squad members Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), and Bill’s brother Budd (Michael Madsen). Then finally, she declares, “I am going to kill Bill.”
There are really only four primary changes in this new cut. First, Tarantino has doubled the length of the anime sequence, laying out the backstory of formidable yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii. Second, the black-and-white gore in the extraordinarily bloody Tokyo nightclub sequence has been restored to full, crimson color. Third, some “segue” material from the opening of Kill Bill: Vol. 2, shot in black-and-white in imitation of certain French New Wave films, now plays behind the end credits. Fourth, the brief coda at the end of Kill Bill: Vol. 1, which featured Bill’s voice-over revealing that Beatrix’s baby did not die in the wedding party massacre after all, is now gone.
In the glowing…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
