After a helpful reprise of what happened in Volume 1, delivered straight to camera by The Bride, Uma Thurman, as she drives through the desert on her quest for vengeance, a flashback fleshes out the events at the fateful wedding rehearsal four years earlier when the pregnant Bride came face to face with her former lover, and boss, Bill, David Carradine. We don't see the carnage that follows, but we follow The Bride as she seeks vengeance on the other members of Bill's gang, his brother, Budd, Michael Madsen, one-eyed Elle Driver, Daryl Hannah, and finally Bill himself.
Volume One of this revenge saga was inspired mainly by Japanese samurai films, and it was violent enough to rate an R classification; in Volume 2, the influence is mainly Chinese Martial Arts films and spaghetti westerns, and the film is considerably less violent and more dialogue driven. As always with Tarantino, the dialogue is very good - witty, sharp. The film is also surprisingly romantic. There are wonderfully filmed sequences, one of the best being the initial confrontation between The Bride and Bill on the front porch of the isolated chapel where the wedding is to take place; and Tarantino's love of cinema is apparent in every frame. And he gets a great performance from Uma Thurman. But somehow the film feels over-inflated; it's longer than Volume 1, and certainly less action-packed; it'll be interesting, eventually, to see the two films one after another, as was originally intended.
