Quentin Tarantino's thriller will please fans who regard him as a virtuoso choreographer of carnal mayhem. Rating: * *
As titles go, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is one of the very best. Partly lifted from an obscure 1978 flick by Enzo Castellari, its eye-grabbing, demented heroism puts it right up there in the pop cultural pantheon alongside the Sewer Zombies song 'They Died With Their Willie Nelson T-Shirts On’ and Lionel Terray’s 1963 mountaineering book 'Conquistadors of the Useless’.
Tarantino’s always been a genius at hooking moviegoers. The chopping off of a man’s ear, lead-performers outfits so cool they kickstart fashion trends, a canny use of tunes so cheesy they wouldn’t be heard on a Guilty Pleasures dancefloor and of once-famous actors whose careers were on life-machine-support status: the director brands his films with a rare attention to detail.
Inglourious Basterds abounds in pointillist detail. There are obscure movie allusions designed to tickle the fancy of the sternest cinephile. Close-ups of women’s shoes so gorgeous they’d melt Anna Wintour’s heart. Delightful bite-sized riffs – on apple strudel! – that rekindle memories of Tarantino’s reputation-defining dialogues about cheeseburgers in Pulp Fiction.
These details though add up to very little. Thinking of it as a historical fantasy unbound by usual dramatic conventions would be true, though also too kind. Mostly, it’s an action thriller, sliced into five chapters, none of which segues successfully into the next. Tension is evoked, but never mounts. Intrigue is created, but never sustained.
Tarantino, in some critics’ eyes, always was a pick 'n’ mix, smash-and-grab postmodernist; this time, whether out of haste (it’s said the film’s production was rushed through to suit Brad Pitt’s schedule), or because the material is too unwieldy (the project’s been in development for a decade), he has created an anthology rather than a movie.
Pitt plays Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the leader of a band of WW2 Jewish-American soldiers all of whom have been sent on a Dirty Dozen-style mission to get behind enemy lines and collect a hundred Nazi scalps. Among his most trusted warriors are Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), a taciturn defector from the German side, and Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth, director of the Hostel series) who enjoys clubbing his victims to death with a baseball bat.
Tarantino sets up their campaign, but doesn’t follow it. Instead, he shifts his attention to Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl from Goodbye Lenin!), a German soldier who withstood and gunned down nearly three hundred Italian soldiers in a siege that is now about to be immortalized by Goebbels in a propaganda film.
Zoller is increasingly drawn to the young proprietor of the cinema where the Paris premiere will take place, a young woman called (Melanie Laurent). He doesn’t know that her real name is Shosanna or that she is Jewish or that, as revealed in the first and best section of the film, she was the only survivor of a bloody massacre of her family organized by SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz).
On top of this, Diane Kruger plays German film star and double agent Bridget von Hammersmark, who is in cahoots with British movie scholar and spy Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender, mercifully bulked up after his excellent performance as an emaciated Bobby Sands in Hunger).
In writing the screenplay, Tarantino faced a real problem. It’s his first film set outside the United States and starring such an international cast. If they speak English it will seem anachronistic; if they don’t, it will frighten American audiences and run the risk of becoming a multi-lingual Euro-pudding.
His solutions can be amusing. At one point, in the middle of a deadly serious stand off between Hans Landa and the farmer protecting Shosanna’s family (a superb Denis Menochet), the colonel asks permission to stop speaking in French and “to switch to English for the rest of our conversation”.
On other occasions though, using sizeable chunks of German and French, and having to switch codes so often, means that he struggles to get into his groove when it comes to injecting his dialogue with the degree of rhythm and snap for which he is famous.
The subtitles, combined with the long takes - this is a film almost as verbose as his last one, 2007’s Death Proof – places a huge pressure on him to make the dramatic scenes, when they arrive, truly special. They aren’t.
If the writing fails to hit the high spots of old, the hit-and-miss casting doesn’t help. Mike Myers has an entirely superfluous role as a British officer. A mono-browed Roth, who directed one of the fake adverts for the 'Grindhouse’ double bill that Tarantino created with Robert Rodriguez, is spectacularly bad as one of the 'basterds’.
Pitt speaks in a cartoonish Southern drawl, carries himself like a cross between Popeye the Sailorman and Clark Gable, and struggles to find more than one dimension in his role.
The non-Atlantic actors perform best. Kruger has never looked as lovely or been so dangerously poised. Jacky Ido, as an African projectionist, is the epitome of old-school heroism. Waltz is fantastic – in command of many languages, cruel enough to convince as a baddie, but also impish enough to remind us that this film is not a historical treatise. “I love rumours!” he pipes at one stage. “Facts can be so misleading!”
Those Tarantino fans who regard him as a virtuoso choreographer of blood-letting and carnal mayhem will be pleased to learn that the film depicts women being strangled, throats being slit, heads scalped, fists being thrust into mouths, and swastikas carved onto foreheads. Yet these scenes fail to chock or titillate. They’re forced, ponderously laboured efforts to make us groan and retch. The film too, for most of its 154 minutes, lacks tempo or drive.
Tarantino, like Woody Allen at his least appealing, is so set on showing off his love for European auteur cinema – GW Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl and Henri-Georges Clouzot are ostentatiously referenced – that he’s forced to employ Samuel L. Jackson as a voiceover and include arrows and captions pointing to Boorman and Goering at key points in the film. The ending, when it finally stumbles into view, isn’t so much contrived as almost meaningless in relation to what has preceded it.
Inglourious Basterds has all the ingredients of classic Tarantino – a camera circling around tables full of yakking conspirators, lashings of epic Morricone on the soundtrack, a female revenger figure in Shosanna – but it is far, far less than the sum of its parts.
Whether discoursing on the physical properties of nitrate or drawing links between Goebbels and Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, it’s a film that’s only interested in film, a masterclass in gorgeously-constructed self-pastiche. Tarantino desperately needs an editor willing to trim his indulgences.
Right now, he’s imprisoned by his passions, as entombed as The Bride in Kill Bill.
'Unendurably, unbelievably tedious … the card-playing scene from Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.'