{"id":84962,"date":"2025-12-07T11:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T11:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/84962\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T11:00:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T11:00:11","slug":"kill-bill-the-whole-bloody-affair-review-uma-thurman-slays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/84962\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair’ review: Uma Thurman slays"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Credits at the end of \u201cKill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair\u201d attribute the creation of the Bride assassin to \u201cQ & U\u201d \u2014 stark-white capital letters that stand in for Quentin Tarantino<\/a> and Uma Thurman<\/a>. The coy initials look a little like something a romantic kid might carve into a tree. Fittingly, the four-and-a-half hours leading up to them feel like a sheaf of love letters. It\u2019s an ode from a director to his star, to the chop-socky classics that inspired it and to every film nut willingly spending their day in a theater.<\/p>\n

Big words. But the saga of the Bride, a.k.a. Beatrix Kiddo, a.k.a. Black Mamba, and her vengeance upon her lover Bill (David Carradine), the boss of her former Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, for mowing her down in a wedding chapel, makes for an awful big movie. Especially as it is now, rejiggered into the epic that Tarantino had in mind before Miramax made him cleave \u201cKill Bill\u201d into two movies as cleanly as a Hanz\u014d sword hacking off a head. The separate \u201cKill Bills\u201d were released in 2003<\/a> and 2004<\/a> before \u201cThe Whole Bloody Affair\u201d premiered at Cannes in 2006 and has been screened in rare one-offs ever since. Yes, it\u2019s taken this long to get a wide release.<\/p>\n

This cut sutures the two halves together while sustaining its unusual momentum. It\u2019s a film so flush with ambition that it rarely crescendos; it can afford to chop sequences, songs, even genres, down to a string of snippets. The exhausting, invigorating totality of the thing sets its own tone. We\u2019re pulled along less by suspense, but by the heaviness of the Bride\u2019s quest, summed up best when Bill\u2019s brother Budd (Michael Madsen<\/a>), a target on her hit list, stoically says, \u201cThat woman deserves her revenge. We deserve to die. But then again, so does she. So I guess we\u2019ll just see, won\u2019t we?\u201d<\/p>\n

Fused into an arc, you\u2019re doubly aware that \u201cKill Bill\u201d is a domestic drama. The Bride\u2019s first combatant, Vivica A. Fox\u2019s<\/a> Vernita Green, a hit woman-turned-Pasadena housewife, suggests dueling at 2:30 a.m. in all-black costumes on a Little League field. Her last opponent, Bill himself, pitches a private beach sword fight at sunrise \u201clike a couple real-life honest-to-goodness samurais.\u201d Both foes imagine a self-consciously cinematic scene, something audiences themselves assumed Tarantino would then deliver with gusto exactly as they described \u2014 isn\u2019t that the hipster pastiche he\u2019s after? He doesn\u2019t. Both die right where they are at home.<\/p>\n

In between those kitchen and backyard deaths, we speed from Texas to Tokyo to China to Mexico, with plenty of other people dying along the way. But the story circles back to insist that home is where the violence starts, literally and emotionally. Bill slays a church of innocents to get back at his ex. The Bride offs 10 times as many victims to get back at him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard,\u201d Bill says, unrepentant to his last breath. It\u2019s the sign of the Bride\u2019s wisdom that she rarely toys with her prey. Once weapons are drawn, she kills as fast as she can.<\/p>\n

The changes in \u201cWhole Bloody Affair\u201d aren\u2019t so dramatic that casual admirers will notice. Tarantino peels away the cliffhanger at the end of \u201cVol. 1\u201d and expands an animated sequence that he didn\u2019t have time to finish. One black-and-white bloodbath is now in color, with the Bride spinning around a dance floor slicing off limbs like a food processor. (Gotta love the sprinkle-hiss sound effect of those gore geysers.)<\/p>\n

Few will mourn that the hokey Klingon proverb in the opening crawl has been swapped out for a sincere salute to Kinji Fukasaku, the director of \u201cBattle Royale.\u201d<\/a> There\u2019s also a post-credits \u201cFortnite\u201d-style cartoon of an earlier excised character, Gogo Yubari\u2019s sister Yuki, who Tarantino was right to delete the first time.<\/p>\n

What has changed is the culture. A decade after \u201cKill Bill,\u201d Hollywood started posturing like it had suddenly invented the feminist action movie. \u201cWonder Woman\u201d and \u201cAtomic Blonde\u201d and \u201cCaptain Marvel\u201d<\/a> with its tagline, \u201cEverything begins with a her(o),\u201d were more sodden with self-congratulations than blood and guts. Tarantino by this point was considered what the kids call \u201csuss\u201d \u2014 not canceled, but dinged by the reveal of Thurman\u2019s car crash on the set, as well as his open admiration of feet, an in-joke between him and viewers until some of them decided he didn\u2019t know when he was being funny.<\/p>\n

But \u201cKill Bill\u201d did empowerment better. It\u2019s an intensely female movie with miscarriage grief, sexual assault and an assassination attempt that\u2019s aborted when one character reveals she just took a positive pregnancy test. The Bride has a maternal streak, spanking one teenage thug with a sword while scolding, \u201cThis is what you get for f\u2014ing around with yakuzas!\u201d But on the battlefield, she and the rest of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad are warriors first, women inconsequentially. That\u2019s respect. (And 2007\u2019s underappreciated \u201cDeath Proof,\u201d<\/a> which builds on the camaraderie between the Bride and her doomed bridesmaids, holds up just as well. If that grindhouse film had been made by anyone with less pressure and baggage, I suspect it\u2019d be officially deemed a mini-masterpiece.)<\/p>\n

Here, the great Gordon Liu of the 1978 Shaw Brothers\u2019 landmark \u201cThe 36th Chamber of Shaolin\u201d plays an allegedly thousand-year-old martial arts instructor who is as sexist as one might guess from his age. But as twisted as it sounds \u2014 and this may have contributed to Tarantino\u2019s ill-fated insistence that Thurman do her own stunt driving \u2014 there\u2019s valor in how he treats the Bride as harshly as he would any student, sneering that her Tiger Crane kung fu technique is \u201creally quite pathetic\u201d and scuttling her bowl of rice to the ground when her knuckles are too bruised to use chopsticks.<\/p>\n

The valor comes when she picks her chopsticks up. You get why Kobe Bryant nicknamed his alter ego the \u201cBlack Mamba\u201d after her. What\u2019s more ironic: Bryant, who in 2003 was at his personal nadir after a rape accusation, drawing strength from a rape victim? Or \u201cThe Whole Bloody Affair\u201d opening with an executive producer credit for Harvey Weinstein? Legally, I assume there\u2019s no way around the latter and, as queasy as it is to stomach, the frankness of it fits the tone. The film recognizes sexual violence as a grim fact, never frothing it up with violins or using a character\u2019s lecherousness as an excuse to leer. It\u2019s horrible and it\u2019s sickening and it\u2019s just there.<\/p>\n

The orderly Buck (Michael Bowen) who sells the comatose Bride\u2019s body during her hospitalization is a snickering imbecile. All of the goons in this movie are. Even the Bride\u2019s groom-to-be, Tommy (Chris Nelson), a Guy Fieri-looking himbo, comes off as a sweet dope who doesn\u2019t know his girlfriend at all. But true villains like Bill are complex.<\/p>\n

As a suspicious young cineaste, I used to see the 34-year age gap between Bill and the Bride as just another dumb Hollywood fantasy where older guys land whatever babe they want. I must have wanted the film to come out and tell me that it knows their romantic pairing feels wrong and maybe even explain why, like most movies would.<\/p>\n

In a word or two, the film hints that she\u2019s an orphan and he has daddy issues. Maybe that bonds them. But we don\u2019t know how they met or when, or how innocent the Bride might have been \u2014 or not \u2014 before she teamed up with a professional killer. We don\u2019t even know if he brought her into the squad as a new replacement for Darryl Hannah\u2019s eye patch-wearing Elle Driver, although there\u2019s a venom in Hannah\u2019s dynamic turn that makes me suspect that he did.<\/p>\n

After marathoning \u201cThe Whole Bloody Affair,\u201d it\u2019s startling to realize how little we really know about the Bride and Bill\u2019s relationship, the beating heart behind all of this agony, and it\u2019s stranger still to realize that the mystery doesn\u2019t need to be solved. You see the complexity of their toxic bond whenever the camera closes-up on Thurman\u2019s face. The emotions are all in there \u2014 sorrow, love, rage, pain, hope \u2014 and in some shots, like an aerial view of the Bride curled on the floor of a bathroom, I\u2019m not even sure which one I\u2019m seeing. Maybe all of them at once?<\/p>\n

Thurman benefits the most from spending an entire afternoon in the thrall of her performance. The scene that most wowed me came after two hours of carnage and an intermission when the story leaps back to the minutes before the wedding chapel massacre, the last moments when the Bride thinks she might have secured herself a happy, nuclear family. She\u2019s so trusting that it hurts.<\/p>\n

Bill walks in, but he doesn\u2019t immediately go on the attack. He lets his ex try to win his forgiveness \u2014 maybe even his approval. \u201cYou promised you\u2019d be nice,\u201d the Bride teases when he makes fun of her groom\u2019s bleached hair. She\u2019s a little afraid of Bill, but not enough. She still thinks kindness might get the best of him. She\u2019s going to need swords and knives and fists and every ounce of resolve she\u2019s got.<\/p>\n

‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair’<\/p>\n

Not rated<\/p>\n

Running time: 4 hours, 35 minutes (including a 15-minute intermission)<\/p>\n

Playing: In wide release Friday, Dec. 5<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credits at the end of \u201cKill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair\u201d attribute the creation of the Bride assassin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3653,47914,47922,1758,47919,47918,47920,48,52,51,47,50,49,47921,4287,47923,47917,315,47915,47916,1557],"class_list":{"0":"post-84962","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-bill","9":"tag-bride-assassin","10":"tag-darryl-hannah","11":"tag-director","12":"tag-excised-character","13":"tag-film-nut","14":"tag-hanzo-sword","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-la-headlines","17":"tag-la-news","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","20":"tag-los-angeles-news","21":"tag-love-letter","22":"tag-movie","23":"tag-opening-crawl","24":"tag-quentin-tarantino","25":"tag-time","26":"tag-uma-thurman","27":"tag-whole-bloody-affair","28":"tag-woman"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}