The first volume of the single film that is Kill Bill ended on a note of pure narrative momentum, and now, like a reader who sets down a great novel to prolong the arrival at the end, we come to part two to find the momentum briefly picked up in an introductory sequence and then ground to a sudden and jarring halt. Quentin Tarantino deposits us in El Paso, Texas, before the events of the first film, and lets us pay witness to the massacre of his and Uma Thurman's eponymous character, the Bride, and her wedding party. Or rather: we meet the wedding party, as they rehearse the walk down the aisle; and we finally meet Bill (David Carradine), who makes a surprise appearance, and see him display a tenderness for the Bride that is not necessarily a facade; and then, when the massacre that we've already seen the aftermath to occurs, Tarantino moves his camera outside and lets the audience put two and two together.

Gone is the giddy carnage and buckets of merrily spilt blood that marked the first film; the death toll in this episode is exponentially less, and the action is less graphic but more violence. When the plot picks up, the Bride has only two opponents left before she reaches Bill -- Budd (Michael Madsen) and Elle (Darryl Hannah) -- and when you consider that these last acts of vengeance are spread out over nearly two and half hours, you get an idea of what Tarantino is going for here; these aren't action figures that are being killed anymore, but people.

Yes, that the dialogue takes precedence here has a lot do with this. But consider the less obvious points, such as the fact that the Bride, it turns out, does have a name; until a certain point in this film, every utterance of her name has been bleeped out, to rather comical effect. Audiences may be expecting some twist, some big joke, upon its revalation, but no, her name is revealed with little fanfare, and perhaps it may slip over some heads that the point of it all is simply that she has a name. In the first volume, she was simply the Bride, an unstoppable spirit of inhuman vengeance. In this one, it turns out she's that, but she's also just a girl with a name that made kids laugh at her in school.

The first two acts of Volume Two concern the dispatchment of Budd and Elle, the two remaining members of the Deadly Viper Assasination Squad. The Bride's methodical execution style fails her here, allowing Tarantino to shake things up and let the structure become messy, less predictable. Much time is spent with Budd, who we learn is Bill's brother, and who still has an iota of honor in his slovenly heart. He has a few colorful conversations, with his boss at a titty bar and with a bizarre little gravedigger, that are the type of scenes that would surely have been cut had the two volumes of the film been combined initially. Their presence here, so out of the blue and technically unnecessary to the plot, color the characters and mark the film as Tarantino's; there are a few things he loves more than to stop the action and listen to his characters speak his dialogue. He's one of those auteurs who can get away with it.

The Bride spends some time underground, where she's supposed to be asphyxiating in an early grave; this gives Tarantino the opportunity to indulge in his other favorite sport: homage. Being buried alive leads up to a moment that has Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci written all over it, but before that there is an extended flashback to China, where Bill takes the Bride to be trained in martial arts under the ancient master Pai Mei. The whole sequence is an ode to Shaw Brothers kung fu films, the kind shot on grainy reversal stock with lots of awkward zooms and slightly imperfect dubbing. Because he revels in these odes to the movies he loves, Tarantino's critics deride him unoriginality; they're mistaking love for theft. If Tarantino was truly simply lifting material, the Pai Mei material would have been tacked on, existing for the sake of reference alone; as it is, the derivative style is simply a finishing touch to a sequence that comes at a necessary point in the story to keep things moving forward.

The final conflict with Bill follows the pattern set by the rest of the movie; his confrontation with the Bride is a drawn out conversation, and while the outcome of their discussion is as it must be -- because this is, after all, a revenge film -- there is no satisfaction to be found in it. The characters in the films that inspired Tarantino to make this follow a strict code; the characters he's written for this film end up unsure as to whether that code is effective, and their adherence to it is full of regret. Add to this the twist that was so effectively revealed in the last line of the first volume and we're left with an outcome that is almost subversive in its emotional depth.

After you see Volume 2, imagine watching both it and the first volume back to back, as they were intended; imagine the effect the paradigm shift of the second half would have after the nonstop rush of the first. Just as he did with Pulp Fiction, he's turned B movie material into a transcendent and startlingly original piece of cinema. It's a truly bizarre fugue: think about where the film starts out and where it ends up, and realize that this is a story you've never seen, and never would have imagined you'd see.

And because I'm certain I'll never see a film like this again, I'd like to take a moment here to rhapsodize about my personal favorite moments in this volume: the meeting of Bill and the Bride outside the church; the flashback to her pregnancy test; and her final scene on the bathroom floor, at the end of the movie. I think of these scenes, and marvel at this character Uma and Quentin have created, and how much, over the course of this story, I've grown to care about her, and how happy I am that she ends up where she ends up.