It was two down three to go when we left Uma Thurman amid vengeance-fuelled visits on her double-crossing accomplices in The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad.

The trio remaining on the vendetta hit list feature one-eyed Elle Driver (Hannah) and Budd (Madsen), kid brother to Bill himself (Carradine).

As the vengeful Bride (Thurman) so eloquently puts it: "I've killed an awful lot of people to get to this point".

Tarantino really puts the brakes on the gory rollercoaster of choreographed mayhem that was the first outing and replaces it with narrative detail and fast-talking dialogue.

Or at least it would be fast-talking dialogue if it was written and delivered with the vim and verbose verve of Tarantino of old.

But what we get is a series of protracted ruminations a long way off the class of John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson's French cheeseburger chat in Pulp Fiction.

The plot is also laboriously sketched in with the background to Kill Bill Vol 1's altar massacre explained and the reason for Bill's brutal attack.

However, there's a couple of action scenes handled with the panache and playfulness we've come to expect from contemporary cinema's greatest magpie.

One nauseatingly claustrophobic setpiece sees Thurman buried alive in a coffin by Budd and Tarantino is on top form in the trailer-bound showdown with Hannah's splendidly amoral Elle.

However, after the mesmerising adrenalin hit that was the first movie, this appears, dare I say it for a Tarantino movie, plodding and unbalanced.

Carradine's Bill may supposedly be an attractively warped opportunist but his leaden-paced speeches have him marked down more as pub bore than off-kilter kung-fu philosopher.

It's all a bit of a let-down but an understandable one. After all, KB 1 raised the bar for action movies laced with an attractive black wit delivered in the style of a spaghetti western.

Tim Evans