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"Bitch... You don't have a future."

Kill Bill Vol. 2 is such a hairpin turn away from the amusing but disappointing first chapter of Quentin Tarantino's mega-project that unsuspecting moviegoers can almost be forgiven for the knee-jerk negative response it is sure to elicit. I was absolutely flabbergasted by the film, and I sat stunned in my chair watching perfection emerge from what I had written off as a self-indulgent, masturbatory mess. If this is not to be the biggest surprise of the year, The Manchurian Candidate remake will have to top the original.

Finally, we see the reason for dividing Kill Bill into two volumes, aside from the purely financial. These are completely different films, and I am perfectly happy to have sat through the mediocrity of the first to get to the sublimity of the second: a far better scenario than splitting the difference. Considering the fractured chronology of both movies and the complete tonal disjunction between the two, a three-hour epic combining them would have to be a schizophrenic mess.

The split down the middle, on the other hand, works perfectly. There's less action here, fewer fight scenes, and not nearly as much goofing around, but the feel of an aggresively stylized epic-with-a-capital-E is still very much in evidence. The Bride (Uma Thurman) opens the film by narrating directly into the camera; later, we see her train with a kung-fu master who is proficient in the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, and, when her nemesis Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) refers to "the near future," the bride growls, "Bitch... you have no future."

But this time around there is more. There are characters, and conversations between them. There's a story, and an apparent emotional investment in it. There are sequences of genuine suspense, not just the director's look-I'm-a-virtuoso posturing. There's an opportunity for Tarantino to write some more of that dialogue that ostensibly made him famous, even if it's not as showy as it has been in the past. This is a movie. Who'd have thunk?

This newfound maturity brings glorious results. The opening "chapter," entitled "Massacre at Two Pines," flashes back to the incident that sparked The Bride's implacable drive for revenge. For the first time we see Bill, played by an impossibly suave David Carradine, and the charged conversation between him and the woman he is about to order killed is genuinely heartwrenching. Filmed mostly in a single gorgeous black and white shot, the scene magically captures both the memory a bittersweet past and a dark apprehension about the future. I knew I was in for the unexpected when, during this very placid scene, a chill slowly ran down my spine.

Volume 2 continues to surprise by imbuing every scene with emotional resonance. Even those that verge on parody -- the very kind that so annoyed me about the first film -- take on an aura of significance; they are woven into the story, and thus seem like directorial devices rather than mindless flights of fancy. The ending attempts to hit a note I was emphatically not expecting from this saga, and damned if it doesn't work.

Tarantino gets performances of impressive poise from his entire cast, and they come through much better when the actors aren't mired in a barrage of empty visual gimmickry and spurting geysers of blood. Carradine, in particular, gives his dialogue such force that we dare not laugh even when he is being funny; he combines Clint Eastwood's unflappable tough-guy demeanor with Ian McKellen's knack for delivering lengthy, dramatic monologues with a level eye and absolute conviction.

The word I keep returning to when trying to describe Kill Bill, Vol. 2 is "precision." Every shot, every edit, every line of dialogue seems to be perfectly calculated; not a proverbial hair is out of place anywhere in the 120-minute film. It is the work of a filmmaker who, given a massive budget, got his jollies out of the way early, and then sat down to make something real. This is what I was waiting for from the moment the project was announced, and I am delighted to have humored Tarantino with Vol. 1 so as to receive the gift of Vol. 2.