"Quentin? Love ya, doll, but . . . way too close."

Theoretically, it should be pretty easy to predict whether or not you'll like Kill Bill Vol. 2 . After all, it and Volume 1 were originally supposed to be one big movie, so it should be a safe bet that your feelings for the first will extend to the second. But this is uber-cool film-geek auteur Quentin Tarantino we're talking about, and the phrase "safe bet" just doesn't seem to apply. The two halves of Kill Bill are vastly different films, and while I'm not crazy about either of them it's for vastly different reasons.

If you haven't seen the first movie, let me get you up to speed: Uma Thurman plays The Bride, who once made a good living as a hired killer. Her former colleagues on the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad murdered her entire wedding party and left her for dead. She awakens from a coma four years later and sets out to kill the Vipers, and anyone else who gets in her way.

Okay, losing an eye would definitely suck, but she must save a fortune in eye makeup.

In Volume 1, this played out as a gleeful, technique-hopping homage to B and C grade action movies. While the lack of both a story and Tarantino's trademark sharply-written dialogue bothered me, I had to admire its audacious style and the way he made even scenes of gruesome violence strangely beautiful. And that's good, because there was a whole lot of violence, dished up in one extended action sequence after another.

Volume 2 goes another way. The action scenes are kept to a minimum and some of the mayhem even plays out off-screen, which is a bold choice for Tarantino. What replaces the carnage is talking, and lots of it. This should make me happy, because wasn't I just complaining about the lack of dialogue in the first movie? Trouble is, while Tarantino's dialogue in films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs was fresh and funny and surprising, here it's uninspired. In scenes like Budd's (Michael Madsen) conversation with his strip club boss, the characters blather on, not cleverly, not insightfully, but at great length. Every major character, and most of the minor ones, has at least one monologue, written and delivered with mixed degrees of success.

And while I thought Volume 1 was overloaded with action, here I don't think there's enough. Most of the confrontations wrap up fairly quickly and with a minimum of style. (Or maybe I just prefer a good swordfight to a shotgun blast; so sue me.)

I LOVE shadow puppets. Let's see . . . a snake, and . . . another snake.

There are a few things that I really liked about this movie, including the performances of David Carradine and Daryl Hannah. Bill is a ruthless killer, never quite likeable but always smooth, and Carradine humanizes him, not in the sense of making him sympathetic but by granting him a certain kind of wisdom and grace. I know it's early in the year for this sort of prediction, but I wouldn't be surprised or disappointed to see an Oscar nomination for him next February. Elle Driver, on the other hand, is single-mindedly cold-blooded and Daryl Hannah plays it to the hilt, stealing every scene she's in.

My main problem with Kill Bill Vol. 2 is the same one I had with Vol. 1: there's very little opportunity for emotional engagement with the characters or their situations. There were only a few moments in this two-plus-hour movie where I felt any sort of empathy or even tension, most notably during one scene that takes place entirely in the dark and another where Elle Driver gets . . . well, never mind, I won't spoil it. But trust me, it's agonizing. The movie could have used more moments like this. I don't know about you, but when I'm sitting in a darkened theater I'm more interested in feeling something than in watching the director wink at me with obscure pop culture references.  

Gorilla Pants rating: 1.5 out of 4 bananas