It might be a slight exaggeration to describe Kill Bill Vol. 2 as a “relationship movie.” But it may look like one, at times, in comparison with the wall-to-wall Asian swordplay action of Vol. 1. Both films are still, as Carradine says, “kung-fu samurai Spaghetti Western love stories.” But as the actor noted in a recent published interview: “The second one has got a lot more of what you’re used to from Quentin; the quirky character stuff, the surprises, the funny stuff."
In Kill Bill Vol. 1, actor David Carradine was almost entirely a sinister presence behind the scenes, a familiar, seductive, baritone voice murmuring on the soundtrack—despite the fact that he played the movie’s title role. But along with Uma Thurman, who continues to cut a wide swath as the revenge-driven Bride, “David dominates Vol. 2,” according to writer-director Quentin Tarantino.
"When I tell people the name of the movie is Kill Bill,” Carradine says, “and that I'm Bill, they ask me: 'Well, what are you, the bad guy?' And I have to tell 'em, 'There are no good guys in a Quentin Tarantino movie. It's all about the bad guys.' The essence of a Tarantino movie is an inside look at the minds and hearts of violent people. That's what we go to see his movies for. It's climbing inside these people's psyches and showing what makes them tick. There's a nobility about Bill, yet you also know he's one of the most evil people you've ever met in your life. “Bill is more fun than anything," Carradine recently told The Associated Press. "Bill has virtually no human problems. He's just kind of put himself above it all.”
In Vol. 1 we learned that Bill, a broker of killers for hire, had assembled and trained a ruthless assortment of assassins, the so-called Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS). Each of these gifted murderers was code-named for a different species of poisonous snake: O’Ren-Ishii (Lucy Liu) was Cottonmouth, Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) was California Mountain Snake, Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) was Copperhead, and Budd (Michael Madsen), Bill’s kid brother and the only other male in the Viper Squad, was known as Sidewinder.
The lethal weapon known as Black Mamba, played by Thurman, the most talented of them all, was also Bill’s lover, and she became a fugitive from the assassination game when she learned that she was pregnant with his child. At that moment her worldview shifted on its axis. She no longer wanted to kill or to put her life in mortal danger. She changed her name, hid out in a small town, and found herself a kind and stable man to a marry.
But Bill was not about to let this situation stand. We caught a few glimpses of the result early in Kill Bill Vol. 1 with the wreckage left behind when Bill and the Vipers assaulted a tiny rural chapel and slaughtered everyone in sight. Vol. 2 gives us, for the first time, a full account of the wedding rehearsal massacre that sets the plot of this two-part epic in motion. After fending off attacks from Bill’s trailer-trash kid brother Budd (Michael Madsen) and her chief rival within the Squad, Daryl Hannah’s Elle Driver, The Bride tracks her ultimate quarry to his lair in Mexico.
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