Review of 'Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair': Uma Thurman kills

The credits at the end of “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” attribute the creation of the bride's killer to “Q & U,” white capital letters that stand in for Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman. The shy initials look a little like something a romantic child might carve into a tree. Fittingly, the previous four and a half hours feel like a sheaf of love letters. It is a director's ode to his star, to the classics that inspired him and to all the film fans who voluntarily spend their days at the movies.

Great words. But the saga of the Bride, aka Beatrix Kiddo, aka Black Mamba, and her revenge against her lover Bill (David Carradine), the head of her former Deadly Viper Murder Squad, for gunning her down in a wedding chapel, makes for a tremendously great movie. Especially as it stands now, adapted into the epic Tarantino had in mind before Miramax forced him to split “Kill Bill” into two films as cleanly as a Hanzō sword cutting off a head. “Kill Bills” was released separately in 2003 and 2004 before “The Whole Bloody Affair” premiered at Cannes in 2006 and has been screened rarely since. Yes, it's taken this long to get a wide release.

This cut sutures the two halves while maintaining its unusual momentum. It's a film so full of ambition that it rarely reaches a climax; can afford to divide sequences, songs and even genres into a series of fragments. The exhausting and invigorating totality of the affair sets its own tone. We're swept up less by the suspense than by the heaviness of the Bride's search, which is best summed up when Bill's brother Budd (Michael Madsen), a target on his hit list, stoically says, “That woman deserves her revenge. We deserve to die. But of course, so does she. So I guess we'll see, right?”

Merged into one arc, you are doubly aware that “Kill Bill” is a domestic drama. The Bride's first combatant, Vivica A. Fox's Vernita Green, a hitwoman turned housewife from Pasadena, suggests dueling at 2:30 a.m. dressed all in black on a minor league field. His latest opponent, Bill himself, stages a sword fight on a private beach at dawn “like a couple of real-life honest samurai.” Both enemies imagine a self-conscious cinematic scene, something that the public themselves assumed Tarantino would enthusiastically deliver exactly as they described it: isn't that the hipster pastiche he's going for? He doesn't. They both die right where they are at home.

Between those kitchen and backyard deaths, we race from Texas to Tokyo, from China to Mexico, and many other people die along the way. But the story again insists that the home is where the violence begins, literally and emotionally. Bill kills a church of innocents to get revenge on his ex. The Bride sacrifices 10 times as many victims to get revenge on him.

“There are consequences for breaking a murderous bastard's heart,” Bill says, unrepentant until his dying breath. It is a sign of the wisdom of the Bride that she rarely plays with her prey. Once he draws his weapons, he kills as fast as he can.

The changes in “Whole Bloody Affair” are not so dramatic that casual fans will notice them. Tarantino eliminates the suspense at the end of “Vol. 1” and expands on an animated sequence that he didn't have time to finish. A black-and-white bloodbath is now in color, with the Bride spinning around a dance floor slicing through limbs like a food processor. (I love the sound effect of those bloody geysers).

Few will regret that the cheesy Klingon proverb in the opening text has been swapped for a heartfelt salute to Kinji Fukasaku, the director of “Battle Royale.” There's also a “Fortnite”-style post-credits cartoon of a previously eliminated character, Yuki, Gogo Yubari's sister, whom Tarantino was right to kill off the first time.

What has changed is the culture. A decade after “Kill Bill,” Hollywood began to take a stance as if it had suddenly invented the feminist action movie. “Wonder Woman” and “Atomic Blonde” and “Captain Marvel” with its tagline, “It all starts with a girl,” were more soaked in self-congratulations than blood and guts. By now, Tarantino was considered what the kids call “suss”: not canceled, but affected by the revelation of Thurman's on-set car accident, as well as his open admiration for feet, an inside joke between him and viewers until some of them decided he didn't know when he was being funny.

But “Kill Bill” did better at empowerment. It's an intensely feminine film with grief over a miscarriage, sexual assault, and a murder attempt that goes awry when a character reveals she just took a positive pregnancy test. The Bride has a maternal streak, whipping a teenage bully with a sword while scolding him: “This is what you get for fucking with yakuzas!” But on the battlefield, she and the rest of the Deadly Viper Kill Squad are warriors first and women second. That is I respect. (And 2007's underrated “Death Proof,” which relies on the camaraderie between the Bride and her doomed bridesmaids, holds up just as well. If that grindhouse movie had been made by someone with less pressure and burden, I suspect it would officially be considered a mini-masterpiece.)

Here, the great Gordon Liu from the landmark 1978 Shaw Brothers film “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin” plays a supposedly millennial martial arts instructor who is as sexist as one might assume given his age. But as twisted as it may seem—and this may have contributed to Tarantino's unfortunate insistence that Thurman do her own stunt driving—there's value in how he treats the Bride as harshly as he would any student, mocking that her Tiger Crane kung fu technique is “really pretty pathetic” and knocking her bowl of rice to the floor when her knuckles are too bruised to use chopsticks.

Courage comes when you pick up your chopsticks. You understand why Kobe Bryant nicknamed his alter ego “Black Mamba” after him. Most ironically: Bryant, who in 2003 was at his lowest point after a rape allegation, drawing strength from a rape victim? Or the premiere of “The Whole Bloody Affair” with executive producer credit for Harvey Weinstein? Legally, I assume there's no way around the latter, and as unpleasant as it is to the stomach, his directness fits the tone. The film acknowledges sexual violence as a grim fact, never mixing it with violins or using a character's lasciviousness as an excuse for leering. It's horrible and disgusting and it's just there.

Orderly Buck (Michael Bowen), who sells the comatose bride's body during her hospitalization, is a sneering jerk. All the bullies in this movie are. Even the bride's future boyfriend, Tommy (Chris Nelson), a Guy Fieri-looking himbo, comes off as a sweet dork who doesn't know his girlfriend at all. But real villains like Bill are complex.

As a shady young filmmaker, I used to view the 34-year age difference between Bill and the Bride as another silly Hollywood fantasy in which older men get the girl they want. I should have wanted the movie to come out and tell me that it knows its romantic partner is feeling bad and maybe even explain why, like most movies would.

In a word or two, the movie hints that she is an orphan and he has problems with his father. Maybe that unites them. But we don't know how or when they met, or how innocent the Bride may (or may not) have been before partnering with a professional killer. We don't even know if he brought her onto the team as the new replacement for Darryl Hannah's eyepatch-wearing Elle Driver, though there's a venom to Hannah's dynamic turn that makes me suspect he did.

After marathoning “The Whole Bloody Affair,” it's surprising to realize how little we really know about the Bride and Bill's relationship, the beating heart behind all this agony, and it's even stranger to realize that the mystery doesn't need to be solved. You see the complexity of their toxic bond every time the camera zooms in on Thurman's face. All the emotions are there (sadness, love, rage, pain, hope) and in some shots, like an aerial view of the Bride curled up on a bathroom floor, I'm not even sure which one I'm seeing. Maybe all at once?

Thurman benefits the most from spending an entire afternoon enthralled by her performance. The scene that most captivated me came after two hours of carnage and an intermission when the story flashes back to the minutes before the wedding chapel massacre, the final moments in which the Bride thinks she might have secured a happy nuclear family. She's so trusting it hurts.

Bill enters, but doesn't attack right away. Let your ex try to earn your forgiveness, maybe even your approval. “You promised you'd be nice,” the Bride jokes when he makes fun of her boyfriend's bleached hair. He's a little afraid of Bill, but not enough. She still thinks kindness could overcome him. You will need swords, knives, fists and all the determination you have.