Story Created:
Aug 20, 2009 at 2:10 PM PST
Story Updated:
Aug 20, 2009 at 2:10 PM PST
“We will be cruel to the Germans,” Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) says near the outset of “Inglourious Basterds,” and in Quentin Tarantino’s hands, the considerable carnage that follows more than ensures this could never be taken as an overstatement.
The relentlessly violent WWII epic, which reportedly took more than a decade to develop, doesn’t feel like it should have taken that long to put together. Not nearly as groundbreakingly clever (“Pulp Fiction”) or never-want-it-to-end fun (“Kill Bill”) as the homage auteur’s best, it is nonetheless an essential piece of pop art by a filmmaker who has yet to betray his reputation for injecting new life into what are otherwise worn or forgotten genres.
Whether it be in the Hague or onscreen, it never really gets old watching members of the Third Reich receive a well-deserved legal or savage comeuppance. This sensation takes on new urgency after we watch the despicably efficient Nazi Col. Landa (Christoph Waltz) use uncanny skills of deduction to ferret out a Jewish family hiding for their lives in the French countryside. Meanwhile, there is no backstory provided, nor is one required, for the other central plot: Led rather implausibly by the Tennessee-fried Raine, a group of Jewish-American soldiers, collectively known by the film’s title, sets out to hunt down and terrorize the enemy in Nazi-occupied France.
These two tales converge when the tragic family’s sole escapee, Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent), resurfaces in Paris as the owner of a popular movie theater — where, as chance would have it, her family’s murderer and other senior members of Hitler’s inner circle are gathering for a gala film premiere. As she plots a dangerously Pyhrric brand of revenge, the Basterds are scalping and bashing their way toward the French capital with a double agent on the team and a climactic act of ultra-violence on the brain.
It has become nothing short of a guarantee that each time you see Tarantino’s name atop a title, you are bound to share in a love for movies and their making that is equaled by few — perhaps none — of his contemporaries. This has remained true despite noticeable erosion in the vibrancy of the words his characters speak, which, in “Basterds,” is never clearer than in the pedestrian manner in which Landa communicates with everyone he encounters. It is played to superior dramatic effect during his opening interrogation; but over the course of more than two-and-a-half hours, his dialogue (and others’) comes off as little more than runtime padding that, in some eyes, qualifies the finished product to have the word epic attached to it.
There is pure cinematic pleasure, no question, in watching a master storyteller toy brazenly with moments in history so recent that many who lived it up close are sentient enough to purchase a ticket to see it turned completely inside out.
The take on Hitler’s fate is particularly bold, delivered in a casually offhand manner that Tarantino has treated many a central figure to over the course of his filmography. That even a larger-than-life figure such as the Führer can be convincingly treated as a tangential figure testifies loudest to the director’s unique ability to expose the vulnerable humanity in everyone he films. Even as they play out what is, admittedly, little more than a pulp comic thrill ride writ large.
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