From Letterboxd:
Review by Sean Fennessey
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair 2006
★★★★★
Watched 25 Jul 2025
Sean Fennessey’s review published on Letterboxd:
Regal Pyramid Mall Cinemas, Ithaca, NY
October 10, 2003
I drove a black Saturn SL1 to the mall. The car belonged to my girlfriend, although we were broken up at the time. This is relevant because we weren’t apart long and would eventually spend the rest of our lives together. We were in college, she in Baltimore, me in Western New York. How I got the car amidst “the break” is beyond me. Her dad owned it, technically, I was just the boyfriend. But I was happy to have it. So I drove to the mall for a date I’d circled in red pen on the calendar.
I went with my friend Mox, a fellow Tarantino allegiant. We’d seen the trailer, read the occasional Ain’t It Cool News missive, the Entertainment Weekly hype pieces. But there wasn’t much to sate a voracious young fan in the relative Stone Age of early aughts movie anticipation. This was the fourth Quentin Tarantino film, bifurcated by the studio in a capitalist strategy turned artistic choice. Mox and I entered the multiplex, sat for 111 minutes and 10 seconds, and exited as changed men. Electrified. Intoxicated. Hype exceeded. Kill Bill Vol. 1 is the great moviegoing experience of my young adult life. There were memorable, formative times before this. Movies that were bigger or “better.” But nothing that felt like this, the tingly, anxious feeling of arrival that hits when a movie sends you beyond the seat you’ve chosen. For Mox and me, we were experiencing references, sign posts, and homage that we barely understood. A lot we would eventually catch up to. But on this day, and for a few months, there was one movie. It’s the movie that made me what I have become, if I had to put a name to it.
The second half of the Kill Bill saga arrived four months later, in a new year. I’d graduated from college by this time. Girlfriend and I got back together, moved to New York together, charted a life together. I saw Volume II in a Long Island multiplex with “Stadium-Style Seating,” all the rage in Farmingdale in those days. It was a more serious, more mordant affair. A family story, with the revenge realized and ruefully accepted. It felt like a modest letdown compared to the indescribable high of Volume I, the “How are we still alive?” sensation of the crazy 88 battle.
I carried the memories of both with me every time I revisited them, favoring Volume I over II, the whiz-bang of the choreography, staging, Spaghetti Western tracing over samurai-yakuza coloring book framework over the more restrained, mournful conclusion. I “got” Volume II, but I lived for Volume I. This more or less held true for 20+ years. Each time I popped it in or caught it on cable, I needed to complete the whole story, but I could rarely get back to the exultation of O-Ren Ishii’s scalping, the quiet sound design against the gentle falling snow at Volume I’s conclusion.
In 2006, Quentin Tarantino debuted “The Whole Bloody Affair” at the Cannes Film Festival, a slightly recut, extended collision of the two movies that amounted to a 247-minute behemoth. I never saw it. As far as I know, there’s just one print of it that exists. I saw it today, with the French subtitles from that screening hardcoded to the print.
In The Whole Bloody Affair, the old Klingon proverb quote that appears on screen at the start of the first film has been replaced by a dedication to the Japanese “master filmmaker” Kinji Fukasaku, who’d died in 2003. That’s as crucial a change as exists, and situates the movie more deeply, as something that extends well beyond the revenge trope that Quentin has always located as his most comfortable narrative motivation and into a wider history of crime films, martial arts pictures, Asian cinema, and high-class exploitation. This version revealed how sincere but surface level most of my love for Volume I was 20 years ago. I don’t hold it against myself. I was 21 – I hadn’t seen much from the Shaw Bros. or Corbucci or Russ Meyer. I was working up to it. So filling in the gaps deepens the experience. I find this to be true for just about any movie ever made, but few more so than Tarantino.
It isn't about catching the references that elevated this for me. The superficial thrills still hit – the moment when Morricone’s “Death Rides a Horse” swells as The Bride prepares to annihilate the 88s had me welling up in the Vista Theater, transported back to a time when my body felt strong and my heart was as open as it had ever been. What changed in this viewing was more clear and a reminder of why Tarantino’s work is still so special to me. Even as a teenager I saw the ways that Jackie Brown expressed a maturity and wisdom that was unusual, but especially so for a pop culture-addled wunderkind who’d just experienced the most singular rise to fame and fortune for a filmmaker since Spielberg and Jaws. What I didn’t understand about Volume II was the profundity of B.B. and Beatrix’s union, the depth of loss, love, and connection between a four-year-old and her mother. The entire movie — the entire Affair – hinges on getting back to a child she doesn’t realize exists. We think we are on the revenge journey to end them all. That isn’t it at all. It’s about a woman on the road to becoming whole. She does have to kill many evil men and women to get to this destination. She does need to gouge eyeballs out, punch her way through grave burial, murder a woman in front of her own young daughter, kill her rapist, and perfect the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. But it’s all to be with her daughter.
So me and the girl who were split up when I saw Volume I – when I couldn’t stop ranting and gushing about how awesome it was – have a four-year-old girl together. Best thing that’s ever happened. And when Beatrix laid eyes on B.B. in the final reels of this four-hour mega-movie, I burst into tears. I just had no way of comprehending it all 20 years ago. I’m still sort of pulling it all together right now. How Quentin, who was not a father at the time, understood how to dramatize this metaphysical connection in his kung-fu revenge epic is completely lost on me. He is one of the true emotionalists in contemporary movies, an artist who uses genre as a trap door for something much deeper and ineffable. This is why I keep going back to what I love.
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