Critical Reception
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 received positive reviews from film critics, with many praising its direction and saying Tarantino had matured as a filmmaker. For Volume 2, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 85% based on reviews from 227 critics and reports a rating average of 7.7 out of 10. It reported the overall consensus, "Talkier and less action-packed than Vol. 1, Kill Bill Vol. 2, nevertheless, delivers the goods for those expecting a satisfying conclusion to this two-parter." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 83 based on 42 reviews.
Roger Ebert celebrated the films, saying "Put the two parts together, and Tarantino has made a masterful saga that celebrates the martial arts genre while kidding it, loving it, and transcending it.... This is all one film, and now that we see it whole, it's greater than its two parts." In 2009, he placed the film on his twenty best films of the decade list.
Cultural historian Maud Lavin argues that Beatrix Kiddo's embodiment of murderous revenge taps into viewers' personal fantasies of committing violence. For audiences, particularly women viewers, this overly aggressive female character provides a complex site for identification with one's own aggression.
Read more about this topic: Kill Bill Volume 2
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rĂ´le with the promise of rewardsmaterial and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the Garden of Eden.”
—Wyndham Lewis (18821957)
“Hes leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropfs and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)