I have supposedly viewed this movie before, but that was on an airplane which doesn't really count, and having seen it again, I must admit that I missed great chunks of it previously. And "great chunks" seems an appropriate phrase. There is no denying that Quentin Tarantino has a certain geeky talent, but his film-making is very self-indulgent. He is so anxious to show off his vast filmic references that how these hang together becomes irrelevant to him. I understand that the Weinstein brothers encouraged him to release the original movie in two parts -- presumably because they thought they would make more money -- but it would not have been an impossible task to edit the original three and a half hours version of the single movie into a more muscular whole. In fact having foisted two relatively slack movies onto his public, I am really surprised that he has not yet done a single re-edit to relieve the DVD-buying public of even more shekels.
Getting back to Volume 2, there are some very good bits. I particularly enjoyed the kung-fu training with Hong Kong icon Gordon Liu and much to my surprise I thought that David Carradine brought unexpected gravitas to his role as Bill, especially after a long career in B-movies. However there was far too much in the way of unnecessary scenes, especially those with Madsen, and this half could have been easily tightened. Fans have complained of too much action in the first half and too much character background in the second, and I still believe that a director of Tarantino's talents could have balanced this out without really losing anything. Besides, think of all the deleted scenes this would have yielded on the "special-edition" DVD.
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