Almost two decades after it premiered at Cannes, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair emerges to drag the masses back to one of cinema’s most famous roaring rampages of revenge. If the screening I was at is anything to go by, it’s emphatically a return. It’s unlikely this will be many viewers’ first encounter with the Bride. 

The Whole Bloody Affair, though, is more than an efficient or big-screen way to watch the former Part One and Part Two back-to-back. With a few choice edits and the chapters stacked up, it’s a surprisingly different experience than watching the Bride’s misadventures from 22 years ago. Part of that is what’s happened in the interim, not least the fall of producer Harvey Weinstein and Uma Thurman’s public challenge to Tarantino at the height of Me Too. It doesn’t feel like Kill Bill reemerges to cover up or ignore that, or hark back to a different time. Instead, it’s a screening that confronts it. Kill Bill was never of a particular time, but by highlighting the director’s move towards revisionist filmmaking, it feels relevant and unexpectedly necessary. 

The pregnant Bride (Uma Thurman) is at her marriage rehearsal in El Paso, Texas, when her former colleagues from the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad show up. After everyone in the chapel is slaughtered, leader Bill (David Carradine) shoots the badly beaten Bride in the head, assuring her that this is not him at his most sadistic but at his most masochistic. 

Waking from her coma four years later, the Bride sets out on a path of vengeance to punish each of her former colleagues with nothing less than death. Across chapters, the Bride (code name Black Mamba) takes on Copperhead Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), Cottonmouth O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Sidewinder Budd (Michael Madsen) and California Mountain Snake Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) as she heads to a showdown with Snake Charmer Bill.

That is pretty much the sum of the four-hour 35-minute runtime, but Kill Bill has always been more about the way its lean plot is told. Graced by a 15-minute intermission at the former end of Part One, the chaptered, narratively disassembled two-parter retains its form. Minor changes, however, make all the difference to Tarantino’s stylish, bloody homage to Shaw Brothers smackdowns, ‘70s exploitation, westerns, horror and anime. 

The major benefit comes from moving the biggest spoiler. Split into two, it made sense for the first part of the story to end on the cliffhanger revelation that the Bride’s baby survived. In its complete form, there’s no need, and it’s far more effective learning the news as the Bride does at the end of her quest. Not being ahead of her really pays off, and along with other, more subtle benefits, helps make this the definitive version.

The proximity of the chapters helps highlight other elements that were previously obscured by the split. The second part, more chronological, talky, and western, needlessly suffered in comparison to the menace, action and gore of the first part. Not only does the full version warm up the later chapters by association, but it also shows off Tarantino’s casting. The duplicate roles played by Michael Parks (Reprising his Earl McGraw from Grindhouse and From Dusk till Dawn, and astounding as the gloriously reptilian Esteban Vihaio) and Gordon Liu (as Crazy 88er Johnny Mo and the brutal, and near-mythological Pai Mei) shine. 

Similarly, the eclectic but cohesive score from RZA and Robert Rodriguez buzzes; it combines and highlights the sketches that stylishly make up the wafer-thin plot. 

The structure hasn’t changed in terms of chapters. The narrative flip at the front of the film still lines up the Bride’s short and sharp suburban scrap with Copperhead, before the weight of the run into the intermission is all about the Bride waking up, gaining her steel and taking on Cottonmouth in Japan—inarguably the second hardest kill and a sign of intent (and The House of Blue Leaves onslaught now pops in full glorious colour).

The most notable addition comes in the anime sequence depicting O-Ren Ishii’s origins and rise to the top of the yakuza. It solves the hanging mystery of the fate of Pretty Riki, the assassin who killed her parents alongside Boss Matsumoto. Marking how dangerous and difficult Ishii’s young avenging was provides a better balance with the Bride’s travails, and a bit of in-universe revisionism adds some valuable extra pathos to the yakuza head. It also indirectly diminishes calls for a Kill Bill: Part 3 that would see Copperhead’s daughter take up the offer of revenge against the Bride (made a chapter or so before). The anime provides an immediate answer to that cycle of revenge and its consequences. 

So, at least one good omission and addition, but some holdovers from the split film are less effective and should have been cut. Redacting the Bride’s name until after the intermission feels particularly redundant and overtly Tarantinoesque.

At the end, there are more surprises. Those missing the stylish monochrome reprise narrated by the Bride at the start of Part Two just need to hang on for the second section of credits. More inexplicable and immediately disappointing is the Lost Chapter Yuki’s Revenge bolted onto the end of the credits. The revenge of Gogo Yubari’s vengeful sister successfully bridges the Eastern and Western strands and was cut from the original film at the script stage due to budget and time constraints. But as interesting as it is to see the scene that was originally cut from Part One realised, its setting in the heightened Fortnite universe (Epic Games co-produced) is jarring. It may well be packed off as a coda viewers can take or lose, but it’s a sorry end. 

Still, minor tweaks and the bizarre decision to point out Kill Bill into the videogame aesthetic aside, The Whole Bloody Affair is the best way to see Tarantino’s now irrefutable fourth film. It’s just a joy to wallow in the simple plot, the singular focus on-screen and off, and a director at the peak of his powers letting his influences shine.