Tarantino 'In-Glorious'ly Vintage Form!

Rating: 9/10 (25 March 2015)

Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino's self-indulgent love letter to war movies —his version of a war drama, with history rewritten to avenge the guilty in ways that satisfy his pop-art cinephilia. It is the vintage filmmaker's rewrite of World War II with a spaghetti western vibe and a cinephile fantasy that a movie theater could defeat the most reviled figure in human history and end all war.
It should be noted at the outset that Tarantino's treatment of the Second World War is unquestionably superficial. Don't look for nuance or depth or for refined scrutiny of what lay behind the Holocaust! Laying his story out in five riveting chapters, Tarantino manages to keep his densely populated tale clear. To put it curtly, the movie centers on a plan to assassinate Nazi leaders (including the Fuhrer) by a group of Jewish-American soldiers (the Basterds from the title) that coincides with a theater owner's (whose family was brutally massacred by a ghastly Jew-Hunter SS Colonel Hans Landa) vengeful plans for the same. Christoph Waltz, delivers a purring, eye-rolling, wonderfully (and intentionally) hammy performance as Col. Landa, underplaying the cold-bloodedness of the character to arresting affect. Brad Pitt is hilarious as hillbilly officer Lt. Aldo Raine, flaunting a cracker-barrel Southern drawl. The rest of the primary cast plays their parts with aplomb.
But, you can't help but admire Tarantino's chutzpah! Despite the wartime setting, we're still in Tarantino's universe. He assembles the tale like a juxtaposition of protracted sequences, each with copious amounts of verbal foreplay. The payoff is usually worth the wait, with telltale tough talk and violent punctuation eventually leading to a bloody massacre in almost every sequence. The violence is often extreme but it comes in bursts and has a comic book element about it. What really propels the movie, though, isn't the gun- toting but Tarantino's brilliantly ingenious dialog and self- assured direction. Nobody has giddier fun making movies than Quentin Tarantino, and it's almost contagious. In every scene, you sense him behind the camera, giggling at his handiwork, winking impishly.
Even the film's final line — "I think this just might be my masterpiece" — sounds like the writer-director being cocky through his lead actor. Inglourious Basterds reaffirms Tarantino as an impudent dude who'll err, but never on the side of caution.