David Edelstein had this to say in a review of Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and the Punisher:
And neither, needless to say, is a patch on the greatest of our revenge dramas, Hamlet, the story of a first-rate intellectual who finds himself trapped in a third-rate revenge play and can’t quite get in sync with it: Hamlet is an attempt to dramatize the conflict between our primitive urge for vengeance—sometimes adaptive, more often grotesquely self-perpetuating, and poisonous to the social order—and our more evolved “modern” consciousness. Four hundred years later, we’re still trying to equal it. Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 are great fun, but when they’re over there’s nothing to make us question our addiction to violent fantasies of retribution. The whole is a little less than the sum of its volumes.
Shocking no?
