Inglourious Basterds: MSN Review

It's rare for a director's name to appear above the cast on a poster (an impressive feat when the lead good guy is Brad Pitt) and Tarantino is not about to let us forget it. He jolts from delicately cut scenes on French hillsides to vicious bouts of violence with all the style touches and retro snazz we saw in Kill Bill. The soundtrack, filled with expertly chosen rarities, thumps along behind it all and we know for certain that we've never seen a war movie like it.

 

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Film-by-Film with Quentin Tarantino

Pitt appears at the head of the "Basterds": a squad of Jewish-American soldiers whose aim is spread fear among the Nazi ranks by dispatching the enemy in particularly gruesome ways. Their tactics are put to good use when they become embroiled in a plan to knock off some key members of the Nazi high command at a Swastika-strewn shindig in Paris.

We won't go further but to say what follows is a long, long way from the real events of World War Two. But this really isn't cause for alarm. The history-swerving story is exactly as bizarre as the Tarantino style, so it works. Revenge, skull-cracking violence and Shakespearian levels of drama are all here, told with all the verve and style we expect.

“If there’s one word that I’d like to run through my body of work it is exuberance,” Tarantino told us. And the sheer joy of making the film is everywhere here. Inglourious Basterds is perhaps a little too long at well over two hours. But the nerdy enthusiasm of Tarantino sees us through, and his smartest moments (he called them his “Eureka!” moments) are saved for the end.

Further to that, his commitment is, ultimately, towards his characters rather than his own fan-boy indulgences. Pitt is a caricature of sorts, making the best of a prominent lower jaw and a southern accent. The real joy is in Christoph Waltz, a wonderfully unsettling Nazi known as “The Jew-Hunter”; Melanie Laurent, a Jewish woman who plots to spectacularly avenge her murdered family and Diane Kruger, a double agent and starlet beloved of the Nazis.

It was originally a 600-page script that might have become a TV series. And the “sprawling” storyline of the final cut has been pointed to by those who perhaps built their expectations too high over the long wait. But if we allow Tarantino to wander between genres and styles as he does, we shouldn’t deny him the chance to cast his eye broadly across World War Two Europe. Nor is it right to expect a down-the-line war movie to sit alongside the crown jewels of the genre. Seen from the viewpoint that Tarantino must and can only be Tarantino, it’s a great watch.

You can't deny that Tarantino is a true original. His long-awaited war movie is rich in thrills and one of a kind.

 

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The Top 12 Nazi Invasion Plots

Film-by-Film with Quentin Tarantino