'Kill Bill' is back as one head-rolling saga

'Whole Bloody Affair' fuses two films, with Uma Thurman ruling every gory minute.

- AMY NICHOLSON FILM CRITIC

THURMAN stars as the Bride in Quentin Tarantino's two-part magnum opus.

Credits at the end of “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” attribute the creation of the Bride assassin to “Q & U” — stark-white capital letters that stand in for Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman.

The coy initials look a little like something a romantic kid might carve into a tree. Fittingly, the four and a half hours leading up to them feel like a sheaf of love letters. It’s an ode from a director to his star, to the chop-socky classics that inspired the movie and to every film nut willingly spending their day in a theater.

Big words. But the saga of the Bride, a.k.a. Beatrix Kiddo, a.k.a. Black Mamba, and her vengeance upon her lover Bill (David Carradine), the boss of her former Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, for mowing her down in a wedding chapel, makes for an awful big movie. Especially as it is now, rejiggered into the epic that Tarantino had in mind before Miramax made him cleave “Kill Bill” into two movies as cleanly as a Hanzo sword hacking off a head. The separate “Kill Bills” were released in 2003 and 2004 before “The Whole Bloody Affair” premiered at Cannes in 2006 and has been screened in rare one-offs ever since. Yes, it’s taken this long to get a wide release.

This cut sutures the two halves together while sustaining its unusual momentum. It’s a film so flush with ambition that it rarely crescendos; it can afford to chop sequences, songs, even genres down to a string of snippets. The exhausting, invigorating totality of the thing sets its own tone. We're pulled along less by suspensethan by the heaviness of the Bride’s quest, summed up best when Bill’s brother Budd (Michael Madsen), a target on her hit list, stoically says, “That woman deserves her revenge. We deserve to die. But then again, so does she. So I guess we'll just see, won't we?”