Inglourious Basterds (18)

Alison Rowat's Review

Quentin Tarantino is as cavalier with history as he is with spelling in this flawed but occasionally glorious blend of war movie and spaghetti western. You’ll find good here, you’ll find bad, and ugly too. Mostly, you’ll find Quentin once again going wild in the aisles of his video store youth.

Inglourious Basterds, given the gonzo spelling to distinguish it from Enzo Castellari’s 1978 movie about a band of renegade US commandos trying to steal a V2 rocket, is an electric soup of characters, styles, and languages. Equal parts crazy and earnest, it’s the movie equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest – overlong (153 minutes), overblown, and over here.

Those who want to know the true, wilder-than-fiction story of the Jewish squads who hunted high-ranking Nazis during and after World War Two are directed to serious histories of the period. Those who just want to see Brad Pitt with a big knife and a southern accent as broad as the Mississippi River should roll up here.

Lt Aldo Raine (Pitt) is the leader of the Basterds, a handful of Jewish GIs parachuted into occupied France to hunt and kill Nazis. You might think such a small group wouldn’t have much of an impact, but the Basterds spread terror among the German forces through their brutal MOs, which include scalping – Raine is part Apache –and beating prisoners to death with a baseball bat.

If the sight of a scalp being sliced off takes some getting used to – and if you flinch at that prepare to have the collywobbles at regular intervals through this ultra violent film – gird your loins and sensibilities for Pitt’s performance. Channelling George Clooney’s character in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Pitt juts out his jaw, Godfather style, and coats himself in southern fried hamminess. Like a post-extraction dental patient, who is also suffering a bad case of constipation, he’s near unintelligible at first, with maybe one word out of five making it past his lips alive. Yet after a time, wouldn’t you know it, the old Pitt charm conquers all and he bags several of the film’s finer comic moments.

By far the best performances come from the non-American contingent. Tarantino, acting like a one man job creation scheme for Old Europe, gives a Hollywood career-making part to Austria’s Christopher Waltz, who won the best actor award at Cannes for his performance as SS Colonel Landa. Britain’s Michael Fassbender is stiff upper lip superb as a film critic turned special ops man. From Germany comes Diane Kruger, playing an actress/double agent, while France supplies the very impressive Melanie Laurent to play Shosanna, a cinema owner who is as keen as the Basterds on revenge.

It’s Shosanna who gets one of the film’s cheesiest lines when she declares to a Nazi film buff, “I’m French. We respect directors in this country.” Way to go to impress that Cannes jury, Quentin.

All roads in the plot lead to Paris, where Shosanna’s cinema is to host a film premiere attended by the Nazi high command. A fantastic (in every sense) outcome awaits, but for the love of De Gaulle it takes a long time to get there. In trademark Tarantino style the story is split into chapters. Some fly by like short stories. With others it’s like wading through War and Peace in a dim light. Scenes are bloated beyond what they can bear and for long periods nothing much happens. While this is much to be expected in war itself, it doesn’t work in a war movie.

More problematic is the clash of tones as Tarantino nods to everyone from Leone to Chaplin while blending high drama, action, outrageous invention, and comedy. As someone who lists The Producers among their favourite films, it feels a tad schoolmarmish for your reviewer to come over all sniffy about respect for certain subjects, but I found Tarantino’s comic book treatment of history grotesquely off key at times.

Largely, Tarantino is content to stick to what he knows, and what he has done before. Say hello again to his trademark riffs (all the fresher for being done in foreign languages), a demon DJ soundtrack that includes a brilliant use of Bowie’s Cat People, and more of his kick ass female characters. Diane Kruger, sporting cheekbones that could open envelopes, is good value, but it’s Melanie Laurent, looking like a teenage Daryl Hannah, who has Tarantino muse stamped in invisible ink all over her oh-so-French fragility.

After the indulgences of Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds finds Tarantino on the way to getting his groove back. Miles of slack would need to be cut before you could describe this picture as anywhere near his best, yet even a below average Tarantino has moments that show why so many keep faith with him. An ageing enfant terrible and terrible speller he may be, but he can still put on a show.

Paul Greenwood's Review

The sixth film from Quentin Tarantino is an often frustrating experience, a cinematic treat that's as deeply flawed as it is wildly entertaining. Inglourious Basterds is a wartime epic that, for all its length and padding, comes across as a bit of a rush job.

In his haste to have the film ready for this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Tarantino wrote and shot it in the space of a few months.

You can‘t help but think that if he wasn’t so intent on getting it to Cannes, another couple of months in the editing room could have made a world of difference to what could have been a masterpiece of action and intrigue.

As it is, we’ll just have to settle for an utterly bonkers but irresistibly good time at the movies.

Chapter one begins once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France. Tarantino’s propensity for lengthy, occasionally overdone dialogue scenes has rarely been better demonstrated than in a leisurely, spellbinding opening sequence where we are introduced to SS Colonel Hans Landa, the so-called ‘Jew Hunter’ played with glee by the miraculous Christoph Waltz.

As Landa interrogates a farmer who may be hiding Jewish refugees, the screws are turned for what seems like an eternity until the farmer cracks. It’s an indulgent way to open any film, but it works superbly, sowing the seeds for everything that will follow as well as providing tension, humour and the feeling that this is a film that isn’t going to play by the usual rules.

Chapter two introduces us to Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) as he recruits the Basterds, a squad of mercenaries whose only job is to kill Nazis with extreme prejudice, Raine demanding 100 Nazi scalps from each of them.

But as their reputation spreads throughout Europe, we skip most of this carnage in favour of other characters, among them Diane Kruger as an actress turned spy, and Michael Fassbender (who will surely one day pull on James Bond’s tux) as a British commando.

Inglourious Basterds certainly isn’t the film the advertising suggests it’s going to be. It’s not The Dirty Dozen, it’s not Where Eagles Dare, and it isn’t even like the 1978 Italian exploitation flick from which it takes its title.

For one thing, the Basterds barely appear, and we certainly don’t get to know any of them outwith Raine.

Don’t go expecting a feast of action either, with bullets few and far between. When they do turn up, it’s in the briefest of bursts of the blink and you’ll miss it variety.

Just when the action threatens to turn nuclear, it does have a tendency to be over as quickly as it starts.

Played mostly tongue in cheek, it almost takes on the aura of an Ocean’s caper at times, albeit a deliriously violent one – when Raine says he wants Nazi scalps, he really does want scalps.

Pitt may never have been better as he wraps a chewy, deep-South accent around his sometimes barely intelligible dialogue, but he’s neither the main character nor the star.

The first honour goes to Mélanie Laurent, who plays Soshanna, the sole survivor of Landa’s massacre at the start.

The real thrust of the story begins in the third chapter when her cinema is chosen as the venue for a screening of a propaganda film made by a young German war hero (Daniel Brühl).

Unaware of each other, she and the Basterds have both hatched plans to blow up the cinema which will have much of the Nazi high command (including a very important guest) in attendance, as Tarantino rewrites history with a reckless abandon that only adds to the fun.

But the star of the show is unquestionably Christoph Waltz.

Equally menacing, equally camp and equally hilarious, whether he’s delivering his lines in German, English, French or Italian, he owns every scene in which he appears, on his way to creating a character as memorable as any from Tarantino’s career.

Waltz won the prize for best actor at Cannes, and it will be a fine performance indeed that beats him to best supporting actor at next year’s Oscars.

The dialogue, much of it subtitled, is the other main draw that along with the performances, makes Inglourious Basterds the pungently funny romp it is.

It’s effortlessly entertaining, but there remains a sneaking suspicion that something is missing and QT is having a bit of a giggle. In the end, it’s the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes of cinema – you know it’s not good for you, but it is ludicrously tasty.