Since he made his debut in Hollywood with Reservoir Dogs in 1992, Quentin Tarantino has been a lightning rod in cinema, not only for the opinions he throws out into the world, but the genre-shifting movies that he has written and directed. Boasting two Oscars, both for Best Original Screenplay (Pulp Fiction & Django Unchained), the filmmaker has made it clear that his time as a director is limited. Tarantino has maintained for years now that after his next movie, he’s going to hang up his hat and call it quits, knowing that he put out a body of work that was him at his best, which will, in theory, put him in contention for one of the best of all time.
A central piece of Quentin Tarantino’s elusive “ten movies and then I quit” edict is that the filmmaker has always, at every turn, considered Kill Bill to be one movie. The wrinkle, of course, in this argument is that the movie was released in two halves, Volume 1 and Volume 2, both of which have their own pages on IMDB, Letterboxd, Rotten Tomatoes, etc. Kill Bill being split into two has ignited debates about whether it really is just one movie or if it’s two movies, and Quentin has technically already made ten. Now, that argument has been put to bed in a unique new way.
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair Gives Tarantino His Only Perfect Score on Rotten Tomatoes
Seismic news arrived earlier this year when it was confirmed that the ever-mysterious Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair would finally be released in theaters, delivering the entire experience as a four-and-a-half-hour epic the way Tarantino always wanted it to be seen. For years, this version of the film was screened selectively, playing at Cannes once or on the screen at Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema theater, but now it’s out in the world, and this version of the film has set a record for the director as it’s now his highest-rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes.
It’s worth noting that Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2 don’t have bad Rotten Tomatoes scores, despite feeling like two distinct movies, though the numbers nearly make it clear that they’re two halves of a larger narrative. Volume 1 currently holds an 85% rating on RT, while Volume 2 has an 84%. That said, the leap from a mid-80s score to a perfect 100% for Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is a surprising one.
An additional addendum should be made about The Whole Bloody Affair‘s 100%, as it currently only has 23 total reviews from critics, while the first two volumes have over 230 different reviews each, a sample size that’s only 1/10 the originals. That said, the reviews make it clear that the version Tarantino always wanted you to see is, in fact, the best one. Slate writes that The Whole Bloody Affair “restores Thurman’s performance to a unified whole;” while Empire Magazine calls the film a “massive magnum opus” and notes, “it’s even better made whole.”
Now, with the revelation that Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is the highest-rated Tarantino movie, it’s worth looking at where it stands compared to the rest of his oeuvre. We’ll include the split versions of Kill Bill to further illustrate this distinct change the score makes to QT’s larger body of work.
- Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair – 100%
- Pulp Fiction – 94%
- Reservoir Dogs – 92%
- Inglourious Basterds – 89%
- Jackie Brown – 88%
- Django Unchained – 87%
- Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – 87%
- Kill Bill: Vol. 1 – 85%
- Kill Bill: Vol. 2 – 84%
- The Hateful Eight – 74%
- Death Proof – 67%
Again, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair having a fraction of the reviews of the other movies from Quentin Tarantino skews the data on this one considerably, but the distinct reveal from nearly all the reviews that this version of the movie is the better one, and the way the two halves work together as one complete unit, may finally dispel the idea about how many movies it really is (and that Tarantino’s preferred version was always right).