(Spoiler-Free)
A ton of buzz has been abound for a while on this one, since the earliest trailer of Brad Pitt doing his Foghorn Leghorn impression. I wasn't enthralled with it. It looked like another self-indulgent, Quentin Tarantino one-trick pony like Death Proof was. A bunch of Jewish soldiers killing and scalping Nazis? Gotcha. What else is there?
Turns out it wasn't all ultra-violence as promised by the trailer everybody was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs about. For a man who "wants his (100) scalps" from each member of his squad, we only get to see the taking of about two. Perhaps Mr. Jolie should've told his men he wanted "lots of talking in German and French in scenes that could've been one tenth as long'." Because there was plenty of that.
We've been duped folks. Not as advertised whatsoever. Tarantino at least told us he was making a genre film with Death Proof, he failed to tell us he was doing it again with Inglourious Basterds. This is a foreign film of dual plots to take out some high ranking Nazis that come together at a movie premiere. Whether we were duped for better or for worse is up for discussion.
I enjoyed the plot, even though it wasn't what I was told it would be. The Basterds are actually only half of the equation here and Pitt is really not even the lead. Those honors would go to Christoph Waltz who plays Col. Hans Landa, a.k.a. the Jew Hunter, a subtly evil Nazi officer. Waltz plays this role to such perfection, I had to be reminded by 40 minutes of Adam Carolla gushing over him on his podcast to really understand. The German actor speaks 4 languages in this movie and is so believable in his role it is easy to gloss over his amazing performance.
On the flip side, Pitt is almost too goofy for me to get past and in my opinion, his role would've been best played by someone else. Why go for realism by casting real German and French actors to play those roles, then have Pitt play a guy with a thick Southern accent for no apparent reason? Even an incognito Mike Myers does a better job in his one scene. The rest of the actual Basterds don't get much to do or say really, aside from Eli Roth, a.k.a. the Bear Jew and B.J. Novak a.k.a. The Little Man. Roth swings a bat, like all Jewish Bears do, and B.J. Novak basically plays his oft-belittled character from The Office in the final scenes.
Tarantino orchestrates some thick, thick tension in several scenes like the French farmhouse opener, which evoked memories of the Dennis Hopper-Christopher Walken faceoff in True Romance, (also penned by QT). The basement bar and the restaurant were also white knuckle scenes, but these could've been cut down a bunch to keep the pace up. We are usually granted a satisfactory conclusion to each one, though, except for the very final scene.
The end of the film is cool, and isn't what you'll probably expect, so much credit to Quenten for that. It would've been cooler though, had it coincided with history, but arrived there through the events of the movie. And the very final scene loses a lot of it's "Whoah factor" by having the same act perpetrated earlier on.
Inglourious Basterds is worth a watch, but much like Judd Apatow's Funny People, it suffers from the self-indulgency that established writers/directors are afforded these days.
3 & 1/2 out of 5 stars
-J
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