‘Kill Bill Vol. 2’

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Starring Uma Thurman David Carradine

Miramax

Rated R

136 mins

Grade: A-

‘The Punisher’

Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh

Starring Thomas Jane John Travolta

Lions Gate

Rated R

124 mins

Grade: C+

It’s time to proclaim April “National Vigilante Month.” It was just a few weeks back that The Rock – he of the impressive pectoral muscles – clobbered small-town-corrupting bad guys in the low-rent remake of the 1973 head-smasher “Walking Tall” and it’ll be another week before Denzel Washington goes vigilante on the asses of the bad guys in “Man on Fire.” This week alone we get not one, but two, films that celebrate and glorify the bloody art of revenge.

I must confess, and this may sound like blasphemy to all those who worship at the feet of Quentin Tarantino, that I was not the biggest fan of the director’s original “Kill Bill.” To me the film felt less like a movie than a smug, though admittedly dazzling, exercise in fanboy self-indulgence. To me the movie felt arrogant; a hiply detached excuse for the ultimate movie-geek filmmaker to pander to his various cinematic obsessions – anime and gore-drenched samurai action flicks – in a way that felt vaguely contemptuous of the audience. As audacious and bravura as Tarantino’s various inventions were, the movie lacked a genuine emotional core, something resembling humanity that could have grounded his stylized digressions. With its eye-popping, ironic action setpiece “Kill Bill Vol. 1” was indeed cool, but it was a cool movie that left me feeling just a bit cold.

After months with audiences holding their collective bated breath, Tarantino has delivered the second half of his grindhouse epic and has finally delivered the movie that “Vol. 1” promised. “Kill Bill Vol. 2” has the centered emotional grounding and heartfelt maturity lacked in the first installment and throws the entire enterprise in a whole new light. Tarantino is no longer an arrested adolescent indulging in his tastes for ’70s exploitation schlock – he tempers his baser instincts with a grown-up wisdom that makes for a film as moving as it is ingenious.

Once again Tarantino cycles through beloved B-genres of old. This go-around has been heavily influenced by the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, what with its gurgling Ennio Morricone-esque score (it’s courtesy of rapper the RZA and Tarantino’s brother-in-arms Robert Rodriguez) and desert vistas, but there are elements of Italian giallos and old-school martial arts melodramas complete with a white-bearded, hard-assed Chinese mentor. It’s the same kind of mix tape assemblage that formed the structure of the first film, but this time the pacing is slower and more langurous, with more attention paid to dialogue (it’s pretty crackling too, as befits a man as known for his screenplays as Tarantino) and characterizations. The time is longer too – well over two hours this time – and the action scenes are fewer, which gives the movie breathing room to stretch and flex its cinematic muscle. No longer is the screen crowded out by Tarantino’s endless homages and gore-soaked ultraviolence; now we get the chance to understand the motives of Tarantino’s band of misfits.

The movie begins with Tarantino’s resident muse, Uma Thurman, bathed in rich, luxe black-and-white, staring straight at the camera and reiterating her single-minded goal of a “roaring rampage of revenge” against the assassins who obliterated her wedding party and left her for dead, a bullethole in her brain. Once again, the movie is split into chapters, beginning with a flashback to the Massacre at the Two Pines wedding chapel that is shot by Robert Richardson in stunning, light-drenched B’W; Richardson’s work in this film and the last cement his status as one of our greatest living cinematographers.

Tarantino has a reputation for resuscitating the careers of has-beens and never-weres. Here, in this case, he does that to a gaggle of them. Thurman has never been better than when she’s worked with Tarantino, giving the Bride (her real name, it turns out, is … ah, you didn’t really think I was going to spoil it did you?) a fierce glint in her eye and a heart-wrenching humanity that pulls the character back to Earth. As the eponymous Bill (David Carradine), who has languished in dreck since the ’70s TV hit “Kung Fu,” acts with a wry, weary machismo and understated intelligence; this son of an acting dynasty is every bit as juiced and energized as he was in his younger days. Michael Madsen, slovenly yet with a glint of razor-edged sharpness, and Daryl Hannah, all smirking, vicious arrogance, manages to steal the scenes they are in, along with Michael Parks in a tiny, attention-grabbing role as a Colombian pimp.

Hannah and Thurman engage in a close-quarters fight that may be amongst the best-choreographed brawls documented on film, while Tarantino – with the judicious use of tense sound effects – builds one of the scariest buried alive sequences in film history (does anyone else have the sense that Tarantino may have added to cinema’s legacy by freely borrowing from it?) When the Bride finally takes on Bill the action results in … talk. Lots of it. “Kill Bill Vol. 2” plunges into the realm of the domestic drama and it is as piquant and touching as the rest is savvy and eventful. When the climax rolls around, you don’t feel catharsis or relief, but heartbreak. That’s Tarantino’s greatest achievement as an auteur, and an indication that he’s becoming a real filmmaker as well.

{ NOTE TO GRAPHICS: Three Squares}

There’s revenge in “The Punisher” but it’s not nearly as artfully staged as in “Kill Bill.” The movie is based on a Marvel comic book, but it’s really just a thuggish and junky vigilante cartoon, the kind of overheated testosterone fest that would have felt right at home amongst the early action-hero escapades of Stallone and Segal. Where “Kill Bill” was fleet and light-footed, “The Punisher” manages to be glum and leaden, more brutal and preposterous than imaginative or cool. This movie does more than lives up to its title.

Frank Castle, the character that would become known as the Punisher, is unique amongst Marvel characters in that he’s not a superhero – he’s just an angry guy with lots of guns and a high tolerance for pain. In the movie, he becomes an FBI agent who witnesses his entire family – not just wife and son, but mother, father, cousins, nieces, everyone – gunned down at a family reunion in retaliation for a sting operation that took the life of a son of Howard Saint, apparently the top money launderer in Tampa. Castle himself is beaten, shot (point blank in the chest too) and blown off a pier – yet he manages to survive, with only the tiniest of scars on his body.

It’s that type of overkill that crushes the movie. “The Punisher” is ripe with ludicrousness, and as the movie goes along, it grows more numbing with each scene of assaultive violence. The director, Jonathan Hensleigh (he helped write the screenplay for “Armageddon”), is no Tarantino. He’s a competent filmmaker, but he stages the movie with ham-fisted solemnity. “Kill Bill” works with the finesse of a swordsman, but “The Punisher,” for all its unearned gravity, operates with a grim and bludgeoning ferocity.

Thomas Jane, who has the sculpted athlete’s body to play a vengeful anti-heroic hunk, plays Castle with a harsh monotone, which may just be the right performance for a script as plodding and lifeless as this. John Travolta, looking like he’s angling to make “Swordfish, Part 2,” makes Saint inexplicably swishy and nerdy, as if he decided that a villain need not project anything remotely resembling menace.

There are a couple sequences of wit, such as Castle’s rumble with a Russian assassin in his grunge-tenement apartment, and when Rebecca Romijn-Stamos gives a touching and tender performance as the abused and frightened neighbor down the hall (the other misfits Castle lives near are Ben
Foster, as a wormy pierced nerd, and John Pinette as an opera-loving obese cook.) But the violence here feels strangely cruel and sadistic, but we’re meant to get off on it because Castle is attacking the bad guys – the faceless extras who murdered his family.

The movie pays token lip service to the line Castle’s crossing (his actions are as bad, if not worse, than the villain’s) but it always goes back to making a fetish of its bloodshed. That is, when it bothers to be violent; “The Punisher” spends way too much time with Castle planting the seeds of doubt within Saint’s organization, when he could have just as easily taken out Saint in one fell swoop. But that’s the level of thought that’s been put into “The Punisher,” which lumbers through the vigilante genre in the way that “Kill Bill” flies right through it.