Review: Inglourious Basterds

You haven't seen the Brits...until you've seen them through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino

While not nearly as disasterous as John Woo's WW2, Quentin Tarantino's take on the era is no success, either. The ungraceful mix of classical 1940s cinema and '70s B-movie excess (and conveyed through a modern lens at that) makes the film end up feeling more like a cheap imitation/almost a parody than an ode to either canon. There's just way too much going on here; even Tarantino seems lost. Most Inglourious, indeed.

The story, or stories, follow just about everything there is to follow. There are the titular Basterds, headed by all-American Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), and sidekick Sgt. Donny "the Bear Jew" Donowitz (Eli Roth). There is their nemesis, "Jew Hunter" Colonel Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz), as well as one of his victims, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), not to mention the German war hero that falls in love with her (Daniel Brühl), and his superiors (Martin Wuttke and Sylvester Groth in Hitler and Goebbels, respectively) and the British scheming against them (Michael Fassbender, Mike Myers), including their celebrity double-agent (Diane Kruger). In other words, there are many storylines, and though Tarantino has Altmanesque skill in this area, the distinctly-underwritten characters weaken the material as a whole, resulting in some major underwhelmage.

Gone are the days of Tarantino's inspired characters and even more inspired casting choices (Mike Myers as a British General is a lone cry to this). Pitt is firmly one-note, and one misstep away from annoying. Waltz's performance as Landa has been a little over-heralded, but he's fun nonetheless. The Basterds themselves turn out to be little more than faceless backdrops to Pitt and Waltz and Roth and the ladies (Laurent and Kruger)—who, like Waltz, are solid, but are given little to work with. The only one who's got anything to work with here is Tarantino, in that, as with the rest of his filmography, he takes a little bit from this, a little bit from that, and does whatever the fuck he wants with it (there's something wonderfully ironic about Quentin Tarantino doing a remake, even if a refashioned one).

Tarantino's loose/open/calm atmosphere is kind of refreshing in this age of quick-cut madness; people are going to grab onto this film for its old-fashionedness alone. There's a lot of life to Basterds, at least relatively, but still not enough to overcome the stretches of half-assed (or rushed for Cannes?) material. Even David Bowie's "Cat People" can't save the day. Since Kill Bill, Vol. 2, it's been a slow, frustrating decline for one of cinema's greats.

From the opening calm to the fiery finale, moments of true brilliance (the red dress, the ultra-quick shootout, "Paris, when it sizzles", etc.) are lost within the misplaced, confused direction of an overly-egomanical director. And, for the first time, Tarantino's Chapter-to-Chapter narrative works against him, carving up a potential epic into something smaller/just another Tarantino film. The original rumors that the Basterds were going to be made up of a bunch of washed-up action stars make this all the more disappointing. What could've been a Tarantinoized Big Red One ends up being nothing more than a mess. A simple, unfortunate mess.


** out of ****

~ Patrick Fryberger