When the news came last summer that Quentin Tarantino had assembled so much footage for his long-awaited fourth film, Kill Bill, that it would be split into two separate movies, longtime fans of the popular '90s director greeted the news with mixed feelings: on the one hand, such pre-production turmoil is rarely a good sign, while on the other, two films are better than one, right?

The brilliant "Volume One" was released in October and while its lack of trademark Tarantino dialogue disappointed many fans of the influential filmmaker, the film's blend of action, comical violence, and homage to various Asian martial arts genres made it one of the most exciting releases of 2003, and a worthy return from hiatus.

Now, six months after the first Kill Bill and ten years after he changed American film culture forever with Pulp Fiction, we have the continuation of Kill Bill. The new film combines the characters and far-East fetishism of Vol. 1 with a Western sensibility, as well as a return to the long, leisurely dialogue style of the director's early work.

But unfortunately, what Volume 2 leaves out is the exhilaration and excitement of its predecessor. Aside from four or five memorable moments, the new film is missing all sorts of things that made the first half great - namely, the audacious violence, the original and engaging characters, the humour, and the visual wizardry.

Volume 2 substitutes all of this out in and brings in several long monologue and dialogue scenes which are, somewhat unbelievably, the most boring Tarantino has ever written.

There's still violence, and while a fight scene between heroine The Bride (Uma Thurman) and Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah) is impressive, it lacks that extra kick that the first film's fights had.

The film's entire first hour is a mostly boring extended sequence featuring the protaganist's fight with the brother of the titular villain (Michael Madsen, not even looking like the same species as his "Reservoir Dogs" killer), and a sequence in which Thurman consults a Chinese martial arts guru (Gordon Liu) feels like a re-do of the first film. The only parts of the too-long film that really work are a third act involving The Bride's final showdown with Bill and discovery of her long-lost daughter, and the Thurman/Hannah catfight. The rest, unfortunately, pales in comparison to "Volume One."

The chief complaint critics had about the first film, aside from the excessive violence, was that it abandoned Tarantino's penchant for comical, streetwise dialogue. Volume 2 brings the talking back, but therein lies the problem: In Tarantino's best scripts (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and True Romance) the great dialogue was ironically off-topic - hitmen talking about Big Macs and quarter-pounders, thieves rapping about Madonna, one man trying to avoid assassination by discussing the ancestral linkages of the Sicilians and Moors.

The characters in Volume 2 are talking about... themselves, and the plot. So in a sense, the dialogue in Volume 2 has no more in common with QT's early work than that of Volume One.

The performances, however, are first-rate, with Thurman once again anchoring the film and Darryl Hannah owning the film every second she's on screen (continuing Tarantino's penchant for pulling forgotten movie-babes off the scrap heap with fine results). And David Carradine, looking like an older, creepier James Woods, makes a perfectly reptilian Bill. He also repeatedly calls Thurman "Kiddo" which, even after we find out it's her last name, is an unsettling remainder of how Mr. Big used to address Carrie on Sex and the City.

A somewhat nonsensical critical consensus has emerged that "Volume 2" is the better of the two "Kill Bill" films; watching it, I got the distinct impression that Tarantino had put 80% of his good material in the first film and had filled most of the second with DVD-extra-calibre footage. So when the two films come out on DVD together some time next year, watch the entire first film and three scenes of second: then, you'll have a Tarantino classic.