REMEMBER, 'THE PASSION' WAS TOO VIOLENT

But "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" is "a brilliant, invigorating work." Get ready for the literal onslaught of rave reviews of this movie to begin, and remember the same reviewing whining about the violence in TPOTC. Agenda? Nahhhhhh....

Doesn't the following make you want to rush out to see this "brilliant" work?

Again the story unfolds in chapters that tell it out of sequence. As the Bride heads for her climactic showdown with Bill, the movie tracks back to the rural Texas chapel where Bill and his gang massacre an entire wedding party and plunge the Bride into a four-year coma. Bill, an unseen though dark presence in the first film save for his hand and voice, is accorded a movie-star entrance: His flute playing draws the Bride from the chapel during wedding rehearsal. In a scene featuring dialogue with triple meanings, the two lovers share a tender -- tender, that is, for cold-blooded killers -- goodbye.

The camera pulls back to a God-like view of the chapel, where slaughter ensues. Then we're jerked back to the deadly hunt for Budd, an ace killer devolved into trailer-trash drunkenness, and eye-patched Elle, still restive for her face-off with the Bride.

The Bride's confrontation with these two nemeses takes a much different tack than the blood-giddy martial wars of the first movie. These sequences play up psychological games and one's worst, most mordant fears involving a snake and a burial while alive. Your flesh crawls and blood freezes.

...and my heart aches for the cinema.