Quentin Tarantino and his epic revenge saga Kill Bill had, as the vengeful lead character in the movie keeps saying, unfinished business. Actually, Tarantino mostly finished the business of re-integrating two volumes of Kill Bill into a single feature as early as 2006, just a couple of years after the release of Kill Bill: Vol 2. But while that version played at Cannes and had a few more recent runs at Tarantino-owned theaters in Los Angeles, it never reached home video (though some bootlegs attempted to recreate it) or a wide theatrical release. That’s all changed with this weekend’s debut of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, a four-and-a-half-hour version of the movie hitting over 1,000 screens across North America.

Tarantino made long movies before and after Kill Bill; features that run over two-and-a-half hours make up the vast majority of his filmography. But in the early 2000s, Kill Bill represented a major pivot for the film-maker, away from his then-signature crime dramas with healthy helpings of black comedy. Tarantino and his Pulp Fiction star Uma Thurman cooked up the character of the Bride – “Q & U” are named as providers of the source material in the credits – as a pregnant ex-assassin who becomes the victim of a vicious wedding-eve attack from her ex-boss/lover (that would be Bill) and their lethal colleagues (those would be the other four on her “death list five”, a phrase whose rhythm recalls Fox Force Five, the fictional TV pilot Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction once starred in). The Bride unexpectedly survives the shooting, goes into a coma, and wakes up years later desperate for revenge, forming the backbone of a movie that pays extensive tribute to the kung fu, exploitation, and revenge movies of Tarantino’s youth – and his dreams, if the vividly colorful look of the film is any indication.

When Kill Bill went over budget and started approaching the four-hour mark, Tarantino’s producer – since-disgraced and jailed sex criminal Harvey Weinstein – suggested splitting the movie into two parts, rather than either gambling on a four-hour movie or forcing the film-maker to cut his opus way down. So instead, the film was sliced down the middle. The gambit worked financially, to the tune of $330m worldwide between the two movies, and hardcore fans assuming a “full” version was likely just around the corner. It was not. But now it’s finally here, more than 20 years later.

So what’s different in this supersized version that you can’t get from playing the two movies back-to-back at home? In several cases, it’s actually less a question of making additions than undoing them. To give the two-movie version a little more shape, a major revelation once intended for the movie’s final chapter was shifted to a cliffhanging tease at the end of volume one. Though The Whole Bloody Affair does throw to a 15-minute intermission after the events of volume one, it eliminates dialogue from Bill revealing that the Bride’s daughter is alive and well. In both versions, The Bride herself finds out about her daughter in the film’s final stretch; now the audience (or at least, the hypothetical audience who hasn’t seen the movie before) learns of the daughter’s existence alongside the heroine. Volume two also loses a brief black-and-white introduction delivered directly to the camera by Thurman; it’s the only noticeable change to the back half of the movie.

Some first-film material, however, has been expanded, mostly to accommodate additional arterial spray. The animated chapter depicting the backstory of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu in live-action form) has an additional action sequence depicting a young O-Ren battling with another killer. And the gorgeous House of Blue Leaves sequence, which has The Bride slicing her way through dozens of O-Ren’s henchmen in flesh and blood, has been slightly expanded and now proceeds in full color. The volume one version switched to black-and-white after a few minutes, and cut some of the gnarliest carnage, to avoid an NC-17 rating. The sequence was already magnificent, but it does gain even greater power with the full extent of Robert Richardson’s primary colors on display: the yellow of the Bride’s Bruce Lee-like tracksuit; the blue glow of overhead lights and the wintry night sky; and, of course, the bright red of all that blood.

The single deleted scene from the volume two DVD – the only time we’d really see Bill in martial-arts action – hasn’t made it back into the longer cut. However, the release does feature a different, non-canonical bonus scene that exists apart from the feature. After the credits, viewers can watch an animated “lost” chapter of the story, deleted from an early draft well before anything was shot, where Yuki, the twin sister of schoolgirl-ish assassin Gogo, seeks revenge on the Bride. It was made for the video game Fortnite, and non-fans of the game will probably wish it hadn’t been. Seeing this inconsequential but elaborate action sequence done up as proper anime probably would have been a kick; as an uncanny bit of Fortnite-engine weirdness, complete with game-character cameos, it, well, captures a moment in time, let’s say. No movie fan will likely find it essential. Some may not even find it watchable. At the showing I attended, it had the additional oddity of being a computer-animated Fortnite short projected as part of a 70mm celluloid print.

An ill-fitting Fortnite chapter does, however, stay true to the digressive nature of Tarantino’s biggest, wildest movie. Watching a single 270-minute version really drives home the fact that in pure story terms, the “important” stuff that happens in Kill Bill could be pretty easily depicted in 95 minutes or less. By design, this is not one of Tarantino’s best screenplays. (I’m pretty sure that at one point, the Bride says “entropy” when she means “atrophy”.) Yet the writer-director was right to resist cutting it. Without the largely extraneous bits – O-Ren’s baroque origin; a long scene where the Bride meets a legendary sword-maker and engages in some shtick at his tiny restaurant; Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) reading poisonous snake facts she dutifully copied down from a website; Bill’s eventual monologue ruminating on Superman – the movie is about a woman having five different fights. With all of that material, it transcends its roots and becomes a brilliant cross between a cinematic DJ set, half a dozen different types of exploitation films, and a sprawling novel.

In fact, the movie works shockingly well as two discrete volumes, with tonal differences that apparently came naturally before the split was even conceived. You don’t really need to see The Whole Bloody Affair to truly appreciate Kill Bill – though, again, that House of Blue Leaves sequence only gets better and more colorful with the extra blood, and fans who live near any of the 70mm engagements will be understandably excited. Even without that lure, though, it’s a great opportunity to immerse yourself in Tarantino’s sensibility or, if that doesn’t appeal, a true powerhouse performance from Thurman. In the longer version, it’s even easier to appreciate how gracefully she moves from physical, technical demands to movie-star charm to raw emotionality as motherhood throws her off her axis and imbues her with an even greater sense of purpose. Some have found later-period Tarantino overly arch and referential, starting with this precise four-hour indulgence. Yet it’s hard not to take the movie at least somewhat seriously, even at its silliest, when the Bride is on-screen. More than any particular tinkering, it’s the fullness of Thurman’s performance that turns Kill Bill into a genuine epic.