Tarantino’s Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is a glorious trip into the mind of a master
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Uma Thurman, Michael Madsen and David Carradine
Classification N/A; 275 minutes
Opens in theatres Dec. 5
Critic’s Pick
Spend some days inside the contemporary movie industrial complex, and it feels as if the world has passed Quentin Tarantino by. Or maybe it is Tarantino who has been content to keep his distance, letting his heroes, contemporaries and disciples flail about while he bides his time, cocooned inside his movie palaces both of the home and repertory-cinema varieties.
It has been six long years since the director has made a new film, and it would not surprise anyone if it takes another six for him to deliver his tenth, and allegedly final, feature. Those who have followed Tarantino into the depths of his many cool-as-hell hells can barely afford to wait – the movies today need another Hans Landa, another Cliff Booth, another Vincent Vega – but as a delayed act of appeasement, we’re finally getting Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.
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Rumoured to be in existence from the moment Kill Bill Vol. 1 opened in 2003, The Whole Bloody Affair stitches together Tarantino’s twinned revenge fantasies into a single 275-minute epic (including a 15-minute intermission). While the new-old version is the cut of the film that Tarantino always intended to release back in the early aughts – complete with the full-length animated sequence detailing the history of yakuza warlord O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), which adds about seven-and-a-half minutes of footage, and the restoration of crimson-soaked colour to the previously black-and-white battle inside the House of Blue Leaves – it is not the additions that make the package worth setting aside an entire day for.
Instead, it’s the deceptively simple act of parking your butt in one single place for four-and-a-half hours, watching a generational filmmaker deliver a master class in filmmaking that feels so magnificently propulsive precisely because it is so exceedingly patient.
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The Whole Bloody Affair stitches together the two Kill Bill volumes as director Quentin Tarantino initially intended to release the film.Supplied
In so many ways, The Whole Bloody Affair is the movie-est movie to ever be movie’d, with Tarantino generously trepanning his skull wide open in order to provide everyone a direct portal inside his cinema-addled brain. To list all of the director’s many homages and inspirations, all the in-jokes and barely legal thefts of intellectual property, would be an exercise in footnote mania.
As Uma Thurman’s The Bride – a.k.a. Beatrix Kiddo, a.k.a. the most steel-eyed heroine to ever run, kick, stab and slaughter her way across the big screen – makes her way through various criminal underworlds, Tarantino ushers his audience through a multiverse of grindhouse madness. Crass rape-revenge flicks, gnarly spaghetti Westerns, somber samurai dramas, disreputable Japanese V-Films and adult-only anime chaos – the genres are all pieced together here to create a pleasingly funky, wildly entertaining and eternally quotable Voltron of a movie.
Having the opportunity to finally watch every one of its deeply weird elements swirl together over the course of one sitting is as satisfying an experience as The Bride must enjoy every time she cuts down one of her many enemies.
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More than two decades after Vol. 1 first popped the eyes and dropped the jaws of moviegoers unfamiliar with, say, the steady diet of Takashi Miike films that Tarantino mainlined for years (to say nothing of such dumpster fare as the original 1978 thriller I Spit On Your Grave, another big influence), there is little need to once again go over the Kill Bill’s narrative.
All you need to remember can be found in one of the film’s best lines, delivered by Michael Madsen: “That woman deserves her revenge. And we deserve to die.” But what might surprise anyone who hasn’t revisited the films in a while is just how emotional and warm this tale of cold-blooded payback is.
Interspersed between the geysers of blood, the showers of severed limbs and the constant threat of sexual assault – something that Tarantino has always uneasily played with, but here feels more deliberately ugly and unavoidable, the director acknowledging that the real world is no match for how sick his imagination can be – is a story of genuine, unbreakable love.
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The Whole Bloody Affair includes new never-before-seen footage, such as this seven-minute long animated scene.Supplied
Sometimes it’s a sick, diseased affection, as illustrated by the Svengali-like hold that Bill (David Carradine) has over his posse of female assassins. But it is also the magnificent devotion of a mother seeking to avenge her child’s death before realizing that (spoiler alert for a 22-year-old film) the child is alive but not well.
The scenes toward the end of Vol. 2, in which Thurman must oscillate between white-hot hatred and heart-melting protectiveness, are magnificent and unshakable, and ultimately rather sweet. Tarantino can be a romantic – as previously seen in Jackie Brown – but witnessing Kill Bill in its entirety proves that he is also something of a stealth family man.
There is, though, some fresh pain in revisiting the films today – a nourishing kind of hurt, but a hurt all the same. Watching Carradine and Madsen chew their way through Tarantino’s dialogue is a delight – especially in the scenes in which the two, playing estranged brothers, get to verbally spar with one another – until you come to the realization that both actors are now gone from this world, and, worse still, that they were so rarely afforded the opportunities that their director buddy Q.T. provided.
It also stings that, after this double header, Tarantino never again worked with Thurman, although in a neat reflection of Kill Bill’s mother-daughter bond, the actress’s daughter Maya Hawke had a small role in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. (In 2018, reports emerged that the collaborators fell out over a car accident Thurman endured while on set, and Tarantino’s poor handling of the fallout, with the director later calling the incident “the biggest regret of his life.”)
It is not only that the entirety of Kill Bill hangs on Thurman’s remarkable emotional, physical, almost existential versatility, but that the actress and her director together reach a level of cinematic syncopation, the creation of an entirely new on-screen groove.
The film’s end credits still retain the words “Based on the character of ‘The Bride’ created by Q & U.” There’s no cute “4VR” tacked onto that recognition, but the message is clear. It is only a shame that the final chapter of The Whole Bloody Affair marked the last stab of that relationship. It could have been glorious.
Quentin Tarantino Films, Ranked
9. Django Unchained (2012): Make this film today and watch everyone’s minds explode. Not a bad thing at all, but also not entirely pleasant, either.
8. The Hateful Eight (2015): Ground zero for many Walton Goggins obsessives, but also the one film where the seams briefly show in terms of Tarantino’s marathon-long monologues.
7. Grindhouse Presents: Death Proof (2007): Too much Tarantino-as-actor (not to mention Eli Roth, who almost single-handedly sinks Inglourious Basterds), and somehow not nearly enough Kurt Russell.
6. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019): I’ve significantly come around to its hang-out movie charms.
5. Reservoir Dogs (1992): It’s funny how the whole “ear” thing today seems so quaint.
4. Jackie Brown (1997): “I’ve got it right here in my Raptors bag.” You sure as hell do, Samuel L. Jackson.
3. Pulp Fiction (1994): Zed’s dead, baby, but the entirety of indie cinema jolted to life in one magnificent moment.
2. Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2003): See above.
1. Inglourious Basterds (2009): Only Tarantino could end a movie by directly telling his audience, “I think this just might be my masterpiece.”
