Tarantino tops himself with `Kill Bill Vol. 2'

When a writer-director -- Cameron Crowe or Paul Thomas Anderson, for example -- is in love with his characters, the fun comes when the filmmaker lets them gab away, inadvertently revealing themselves. The joy when Quentin Tarantino's creations speak is the opposite. Despite their hilariously florid rapping, his folks are also incredibly cagey: They never give the entire game away. This shrewdness is the template for the long dialogues in Kill Bill Vol. 2, the most voluptuous comic-book movie ever made.

In this deliciously perverse picture -- Tarantino delights in distending climaxes and emotional connections for so long we almost forget about conventional satisfactions -- everything is operatic, including the despair and the pauses. This is an epic of Conradian proportions (Robert Conradian proportions). Uma Thurman, whose speaking voice has a lyric, teasing quality -- if Dusty Springfield had been an actress, she would have been Thurman -- is just the performer to convey Tarantino's mordant slyness. (She also shows a rueful expansiveness that gives this film a heart.) His movies are about loss and betrayal, and Kill Bill Vol. 2 is a double-burger helping of those motifs. It is rich, substantial and sustained, yet also greasy kids' stuff, a wrapper filled with an extra large order of chili fries, stained with ketchup, salt and cheese.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 was Tarantino's fourth movie, so I suppose that makes Vol. 2 his fourth-and-a-half. Bill was broken into two, and the reasoning behind that decision is now evident. The parts could easily have been edited into, well, a single volume; it was conceived that way. But the two films are very different in tone.

The first episode was whipped into a tidal wave of blood lust. Unfortunately it was all setup: the longest first act in movie history, staged -- and edited -- like a series of Pablo Ferro trailers. Vol. 2 provides the second and third acts in one convenient serving, told in a languorous flashback-within-a-flashback. It offers long, airy takes that suggest Visconti with attention deficit disorder; in other words it's the narrative style that Sergio Leone employed in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

This semisequel, like its predecessor, offers a guided tour of Tarantino's sensibility, loaded as it is with pop-culture references that will sate even the most vulpine appetite for the stuff. (It could be subtitled, They Saved Tarantino's Brain.)

All of the director's musical, film and comic-book loves are on display; he gives much play to the grungy martial-arts melodrama Five Fingers of Death, evoking its use of Quincy Jones' Ironside theme and plucking several other of its plot devices. As befits that kind of density, there are more entrances, back stories and origins in "Vol. 2" than in the first hundred issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, Leone's Man With No Name trilogy and all the Shogun Assassin movies combined.

But unlike the 100m-high hurdles of Vol. 1, Vol. 2 feels like a cross-country run, with hills and long stretches of flatland, as it settles into its casual, carnage-laden pace. It has the wily, extended cadences of Leone's movies, with the first 15 or so minutes filmed in loamy, luscious black-and-white and set in what could only be called exploitation-picture Texas. (What the master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro does with shadow, the director of photography Robert Richardson does with light, painting even the interiors with warm, bright flares. His harsh but loving glow permeates this adventure and, like Storaro's, his signature is instantly recognizable.)