Six years have gone by since Quentin Tarantino’s last feature, the elegiac Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood. Since then, Tarantino—now a father of two—has retreated into family life, buying property in Tel Aviv, writing books, and emerging occasionally to say something incendiary. But the tone has changed. Once a smart-mouthed maverick who forced Hollywood to pay attention through the sheer force of his talent, now—whether he likes it or not—he’s part of the establishment. And statements like calling Paul Dano’s performance in There Will Be Blood “weak sauce” play much differently coming from an insider than they do from an upstart. It comes across as punching down. Contrarianism. An old man yelling at a cloud.
The director has always been afraid of being seen as old and out of touch. He’s said so himself, telling Playboy in a 2012 interview that “directors don’t get better as they get older. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film fucks up three good ones.” He added to the statement in 2014, saying, “I don’t believe you should stay onstage until people are begging you to get off.” These interviews show a clear self-conscious streak, and a preoccupation with public perception. And if Tarantino is serious about any of this, he’ll follow through and make that 10th feature. Because if the last thing he ever directs is a Fortnite animation with a dancing banana, all that talk about legacy will have been for nothing.
First, some context. Because nothing says “with it” like creating an original piece of machinima in 2025, the upcoming theatrical release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which combines both volumes into a single feature, will be accompanied by The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge, an eight-minute animated short film. Yuki’s Revenge is essentially a post-credits sequence, tacked on at the very end of multiple, often redundant credits sequences; it premiered in Fortnite on November 30, and uses motion-capture technology to insert Uma Thurman’s assassin character Beatrix Kiddo, a.k.a. The Bride, into the Fortnite universe.
The story comes from a scene that was cut from Tarantino’s original Kill Bill script, in which Yuki, the equally psychopathic twin sister of Gogo Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama), travels to L.A. for a bullet-riddled confrontation with The Bride. It takes place between Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2 and explains what happened to the Pussy Wagon, filling a plot hole out of reverence for its own internal lore. It’s also a piece of first-draft detritus that should have stayed in the drawer, an embarrassing misstep that confirms that Tarantino’s worst fears have come to pass: He’s lost touch with what made him successful.
Like much of the footage restored for The Whole Bloody Affair, Yuki’s Revenge is ostensibly violent. But this is Fortnite, and that means that realistic gore is off the table. Instead, Tarantino has Yuki drink an amphetamine-like potion that turns her into a tweaked-out kawaii Bugs Bunny character who bleeds blue pixels. Cartoonish violence is not out of character for the director: Restoring the color to the famous, still-electrifying “House Of Blue Leaves” sequence in this new version of the film casts that bloody battle in a sillier light as well. But the big problem with Yuki’s Revenge isn’t that it’s silly. It’s that it looks like shit.
The short is credibly directed, and features a handful of Tarantino’s signature flourishes, like an extreme close-up on Thurman’s avatar’s eyes. But the rhythms are all off. The animations are crude, and fail to lift Yuki (a generic gun-toting, selfie-crazed Japanese schoolgirl) to the mythic status afforded to her live-action counterparts. Paired with characters like Peely the banana and Skull Trooper Jonesy, it’s exactly what you would expect from the overgrown adolescent who Tarantino’s detractors have always alleged him to be—or at least from a semi-retired rich guy who’s comfortably siloed enough to find his own video-game habits fascinating.
Tarantino also voices Bill in Yuki’s Revenge, taking over for David Carradine, who died in 2009. (No, they do not sound similar. Yes, it is off-putting.) The whole thing is indulgent, but the director putting himself into the role of a manipulative “Snake Charmer” who tries to kill off his star assassin once she’s no longer useful gains a new resonance now that the story of Thurman’s car crash on the set of Kill Bill, and her subsequent falling out with Tarantino, have been made public. The two have since reconciled, and Tarantino has validated Thurman’s story by finding and releasing footage of the crash. But the obliviousness behind this particular piece of stunt casting is another of the director’s less flattering attributes.
Of course, the name that, in retrospect, really gives The Whole Bloody Affair‘s undercurrent of sexual violence a sour taste is that of executive producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, who is currently in prison awaiting retrial. Rewatching Kill Bill 20 years later, it’s tempting to see the saga as a subconscious expression of the real-life dynamics unfolding at the time: Men’s violence, a woman’s rage at being exploited and discarded as an instrument of that violence, and a filmmaker voyeuristically observing that rage, elevating the woman into an untouchable action-movie goddess.
Its identification with and sympathy for female rage is the strength of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which ironically comes across more effectively when viewing the film as it was originally intended. It really does play better as one long, epic four-and-a-half-hour action movie, with the talky second half serving as a grounding respite after the ultraviolent mayhem of the first. We wake up, are filled with anger, and experience the cathartic rush of revenge along with Thurman’s character.
Her action sequences are even more pummeling in this version of the film, as much of what’s been added to Kill Bill for The Whole Bloody Affair are gore shots too explicit for the censors back in 2003. (One notable example: In The Whole Bloody Affair, we actually see The Bride cut off Sofie Fatale’s other arm before dumping her in an emergency-room parking lot.) We also get a new animated sequence from Production I.G., the Japanese studio that animated O-Ren’s origin story for the original film. This “lost chapter” is outrageously bloody as well, as 13-year-old O-Ren ambushes yakuza Pretty Riki and his henchmen in an elevator with guns, hand grenades, and of course, her short samurai sword.
All of this bloodshed is exhausting, for the audience as well as The Bride, now unmasked as the mortal woman Beatrix Kiddo. And so, after a short intermission, it’s a relief to settle into the slower Western rhythms of the film’s second half. Beatrix triumphs over death, serves justice, and finally comes to terms with the psychic (and physical) consequences of her ordeal. By the end of the movie, we feel bruised and battered as well, even if our only injury is numbness from an uncomfortable theater seat. Using the heightened visual language of global action cinema, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair elevates one woman’s revenge into the revenge of women writ large. Both films are better when paired, and together they’re one of the strongest—if not the strongest—thing Tarantino has ever done.
Just make sure to leave before the credits are over if you want to maintain that opinion.
