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Kill Bill

Genre poetry from B-movies' poet laureate, Quentin Tarantino's conclusion to Kill Bill is marked by the filmmaker's carefully calibrated celluloid insanity, as well as a deceptive maturity that allows a few powerfully struck grace notes for the cult of femininity and the sanctity of motherhood. Its first portion overwhelming for its craft before lodging in the craw with its ever-present but tantalizingly difficult-to-nail moral code, Tarantino's epic whole clarifies a dedication to a sort of low, Samuel Fuller/Nicholas Ray tabloid cosmology, grounding itself eventually in the bold, lovely, curiously old-fashioned declaration that the last best reward is to be true to the primal clay of an idea of innate gender roles. The Bride (Uma Thurman) is so named not merely for camp grandeur's sake, but to highlight the power of cultural archetypes and their roots in biology.

Continuing her mission to kill those who have left her for dead and stolen her baby, The Bride (her real name revealed in the final reel) seeks out Bud (Michael Madsen), Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah in her best performance, ever), and Bill (David Carradine). More backstory is provided in the form of The Bride's tutelage under master Pai Mei (Shaolin legend Gordon Liu), the relationship between Bud and Bill, and the ultimate fates of all involved, including the reason for Elle's missing eye and Bill's alarming masochism.

Kill Bill is passion for film captured on film, a picture that joins Hellboy on the shortlist of 2004 genre exercises that reveal a genuine voice, respect, affection for genre film. It understands that the heartbeat of the cinema isn't the romantic comedy or the costume epic, but the magic and the joy of the impossible made light. Far from a series of empty stylistic flourishes and unrestrained fanboyism, Kill Bill demonstrates a keen understanding of narrative and character development--a reminder of why it is that Tarantino is possibly the most influential American director of the...