QUENTIN Tarantino said he had left the character development, the verbal jousting, the back story and all but the knuckles of Bill for the second instalment.

So, why did Bill (David Carradine) want to kill his former lover and member of his Deadly Vipers assassination squad, The Bride (Uma Thurman), leading to all that chop-socky carnage in last autumn's Volume One?

It wasn't personal, nor was it physical.

When the final showdown comes in Tarantino's Western revenge comedy in his swell Mexican boot hole, Bill reveals that his squad of "renegade killer" bees were not meant to walk the standard mortal world. They were from another world, and not the alternative world of The Matrix or The Prisoner, but the unreal, heightened world of comic books: call it Tarantinoscope if you like, with its slow, drawling speech patterns.

Uma Thurman's wink at the camera - as seen in the trailer and at the finale - tells you that ultimately The Bride is not to be taken seriously in the manner of a Medea or Lady Macbeth, but rather she occupies a world alongside Lara Croft.

That said, Thurman's The Bride is put through wholly human emotional suffering in a film that is conducted at a slower speed than Volume 1 and does not add new tricks to its armoury (there is no animated sequence this time, for example).

The Bride made short shrift of most of her hit list last time in Asia, and so only the trailer-trash duo of Michael Madsen's heavy-drinking Budd and Daryl Hannah's eye-patch-wearing Elle Driver stand between her and Bill.

This gives Tarantino the chance to maximise their cat-and-mouse games in the American West and Mexico, leading to a brilliantly filmed claustrophobic scene with Thurman encased inside a wooden box, and one hell of a blonde-on-blonde cat-fight.

All this is done with a brilliant humorous panache by Tarantino, whose pay-off lines for Thurman are in the grand tradition of a Clint Eastwood or John Wayne.

He also fills in more detail of The Bride's training, as she learns samurai skills from the venerable Pei Mei (1970s martial arts star Gordon Liu), who leaves Yoda looking like a novice. What fun Liu had with his mad eyebrows and long white beard, and how Tarantino enjoys rivalling Ang Lee's gymnastic high-wire feats in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Just as Tarantino resurrected John Travolta's career so he brings David Carradine to the fore once more, and the climactic confrontation between The Bride and Bill is well worth the wait.

Volume One had the action, Volume Two has the words, and Tarantino is a mad master of both.

Updated: 16:28 Thursday, April 22, 2004