Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair Review: The Action Classic Becomes a Melancholy Drama

Once upon a time there was a woman who was very, very, very good at killing people, and then she pretended that she wasn’t, that she was a regular person, but she was just too good at killing for that ever to be true.

When Quentin Tarantino released his magnum opus, the female-driven roaring rampage of revenge that is Kill Bill, in two halves in 2003 and 2004, it was already known that he’d intended it to be a single film but was pressured by Miramax to cut it in half. The response at the time was pretty universal. Vol. 1 was a brutal, brilliant homage to the films that influenced Tarantino: Blaxploitation, noir, samurai flicks. Vol. 2 moved the influences to Spaghetti Westerns, Shaw Brothers beat ’em ups and Mexican-American cross border crime flicks, and was still a fantastic film but somehow lesser, a little sluggish and talky, almost anti-climactic.

Two decades later, and after a handful of rare and often secretive screenings of what was known as the integral version, QT’s full, unified vision emerges, and one thing is clear. He was right, and the Weinsteins were wrong. The story of the Bride (Uma Thurman) and her quest for vengeance after she is gunned down by her former lover, merciless international crime boss and mercenary Bill (David Carradine), and her former colleagues in the Deadly Vipers is one story. The fourth and fifth film from Tarantino now become the singular fourth, and in that recombobulation everything benefits – most especially the chapters that were in the second part after the bifurcation.

But, more importantly, the Vol. 1 segments are softened and deepened, and the slow wordiness of Vol. 2 becomes revealed as a cloud of melancholy. As the Bride travels around the world on a butcherous mission of revenge for her lost life and the child to whom she never became a mother, the balance between her love for violence and her desire to leave it behind is placed in sharper focus. The formerly forgettable campfire scene in which a bubbly teen version of the Bride hangs on Bill’s every word as he recounts a horrifying story of cranky old sensei Pai Mei (Gordon Liu) becomes a reminder that she chose this life.

Through this reconstruction, Tarantino truly makes everything old new again. In many ways, it is just the two films spliced together, and he retains the sole editing credit for his late, great collaborator, Sally Menke. There are additions to earlier versions, such as the extended anime sequence explaining the childhood of Deadly Venom and future Yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii (a glacial and brutal Lucy Liu). But bringing all the elements together makes his intentions flourish. Old themes are reenforced, like the unfairness of how Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) gets the family life that the Bride was denied, or how Bill’s sexual and emotional manipulation of his favorite warrior is mirrored in the passionate devotion of Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah as the embodiment of vindictive cruelty). However, the restructuring creates new resonances, so when Michael Madsen delivers his great speech as Bill’s brother Budd about how they all deserve to die – and he takes that beat to let his words sink in – his words are no longer a recap of Vol. 1 for the sequel but a weary warning. There’s even a new poignancy to some scenes revealed by this structure, like how only the corrupt are killed, lacerated, and mutilated onscreen, while the innocent (such as the wedding party in Chapter 6, “The Massacre at Two Pines”) are given the dignity of dying offscreen. Moreover, this version reinforces that no one walks away from this life, and the seeds of intergenerational trauma that Tarantino planted 21 years ago now flower. In its singular form, the action classic becomes a tragedy with an unexpectedly compassionate streak, fulfilling Tarantino’s original ambition.

Tarantino even got to complete a missing segment, “Yuki’s Revenge,” in which Yuki (voiced by Miyu Ishidate Roberts), the sister of psychopathic schoolgirl enforcer, Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama), hunts down the Bride. Executed in Unreal Engine and included as a post-credit Chapter 5.2 after debuting on Fortnight of all places, it’s fun and slight and doesn’t add anything to the story other than explain exactly what happened to the infamous Pussy Wagon.

Wisely, Tarantino didn’t add it into the main film because it doesn’t need it (it does, however, need the greatly-appreciated 15-minute intermission that he added – thanks, Quentin). The story is now complete, and the narrative and emotional flow makes more sense now. It wasn’t that Vol. 2 was too slow, it’s that Vol. 1 was overloaded with more immediately memorable sequences, like the suburban household fight with Fox, or the unforgettable House of Blue Leaves where the bride takes on O-Ren and her Crazy 88. Reuniting what should never have been rendered asunder recontextualizes the whole story, and emphasizes the greatness of Thurman’s performance, much of which is silent. It’s not just the action sequences, in which she and stunt double Zoë Bell convince the audience that, as Pai Mei would put it, a silly blond Caucasian girl could take down an entire Yakuza clan with a samurai sword. It’s in her eyes, how they well up and burn with cold fire, and in her feet (no jokes, please), and the way she shifts her weight. It’s an astonishingly complete performance, both cartoonish and weighty, and that’s what Tarantino does better than any other director.

It’s all still undeniably a grab bag of influences and homages, from jidaigeki classic Lady Snowblood to Spaghetti Western deep cut Il Grande Duello, and an opportunity for him to work with icons like Carradine and Sonny Chiba. But, as the saying goes, great artists steal. The unspoken coda is that they steal because they love and they appreciate what they purloin, and no one synthesizes and transforms influences like Tarantino, especially back in the early 2000s.  With Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, he finally gets to complete his own work of cinematic archeology, and what he exhumes springs to life like the first time it was projected. Viva Kill Bill!

This article appears in December 5 • 2025.