TV Times

TV Times

Black Mamba is out to Kill Bill
By Harinda Vidanage
The second half of the Western Spaghetti of Quentin Tarantino has sliced its way to the top of the box office. Tarantino has the capability to deliver with sheer force any movie it takes a really short time to hit the jackpot. Kill Bill Vol 2 features the hyped up avenging spree of The Bride Aka, Black Mamba or for movie fans the beautiful Uma Thurman.

In Kill Bill Vol 1 we learned that Bill, a broker of killers for hire, had assembled and trained a ruthless assortment of assassins, the so-called Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS). Each of these trained killers were code-named for a different species of poisonous snake: O’Ren-Ishii (Lucy Liu) was Cottonmouth, Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) was California Mountain Snake, Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) was Copperhead, and Budd (Michael Madsen), Bill’s kid brother and the only other male in the Viper Squad, was known as Sidewinder.

In Vol 1 the Black Mamba took out three of her former fellow assaisns but the Vol 2 features her killing spree intensifying to reaching her ultimate kill, Bill. In Volume 1 we were never introduced to this shadowy contractor graphically. Thurman is on this killing spree because it was Bill who ruined her life and his Divas played their part towards it.

The lethal weapon of the Divas was none other than the Black Mamba , the most talented of them all, was also Bill’s lover, and she became a fugitive from the assassination game when she learned that she was pregnant with his child. At that moment her worldview shifted on its axis. She no longer wanted to kill or to put her life in mortal danger. She changed her name, hid out in a small town, and found herself a kind and stable man to marry. But this was the moment of reversal of fortunes for the runaway assassin, what takes place in her wedding is a cold blooded massacre from which she is the sole survivor.

This triggers the revenge killing of Thurman who systematically eliminates all the Divas and seeks to terminate its founder, her ex lover Bill and master mind behind the massacre. Played by David Carradine Bill is an elusive character who is also a master killer and ace hit man. According to Carradine ‘There are no good guys in a Quentin Tarantino movie. It’s all about the bad guys.’ The essence of a Tarantino movie is an inside look at the minds and hearts of violent people. That’s what we go to see his movies for. It’s climbing inside these people’s psyches and showing what makes them tick.

There’s a nobility about Bill, yet you also know he’s one of the most evil people you’ve ever met in your life. “Bill is more fun than anything,” Carradine recently told The Associated Press. “Bill has virtually no human problems. He’s just kind of put himself above it all.”

The on-screen relationship between the film’s two formative genre styles is straightforward: The present time sequences, set in the American Southwest and Mexico, adhere to the style of the Italian Westerns.

The flashback sections, set mostly in China, where Bill takes The Bride for a period of training with his own former master, Pei Mei, have the “training-for-revenge” structure of a classic kung fu picture.

The action sequences in the Kill Bill script were already unusually detailed. Tarantino had been re-writing and refining them in the planning, training, and rehearsals phases for the better part of a year.

In Beijing he continued the process, describing the scenes in even more detail and when necessary acting them out. Surrounded by a team of Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese translators, he had worked through each shot as the crew, the actors, Master Yuen, and the wirework team watched and walked through it alongside him. By the time they hit the ground on Miao Gao Mountain, they were ready to rumble.

Master Yuen’s action choreography has been featured to great acclaim in The Matrix and its sequels, and in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as well as in dozens of Hong Kong productions. But Tarantino was a Yuen fan long before the Master achieved his Western breakthrough. So let the blade take control and see the amazing final half of this epic cult creation.

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