Not What I Expected

Rating: 4/10 (15 April 2013)

It is really known that when you see a movie by Quentin Tarantino, you are in for a movie experience like any other. The man who brought us Kill Bill, Django Unchained, and Pulp Fiction brings Inglorious Bastards. I expected really slick dialogue and a lot of action. I tried to enjoy this movie, I really did, but with the English subtitles taking me out of the story, the conversations and characters I don't really care about, and the little action, Tarantino swung and missed with this movie. Inglorious was his worst movie since Kill Bill 2. Brad Pitt stars, I guess he stars since he is in the movie so little, as a leader of the Inglorious Bastards. The Bastards hunt down and kill Nazis. When Pitt is on screen he is entertaining and he did a good job acting, but I wanted to see him more. It takes a long time to introduce his character and we don't see him all that much. Instead, the movie focuses on many characters and it is almost confusing to remember who is who. There was also the Jewish girl who escapes, the members of the inglorious bastards, a few key Nazis including Hitler, the random lady who I don't even know the name of, and then there is the Nazi General played by Christoph Waltz. Waltz is the only reason I didn't hate the movie. He saved the movie for me. He won an Oscar for best actor in a supporting role and for most of the movie I was trying to figure out why. He shows up a lot in the beginning speaking back and forth from English, French, and German, but his conversations are just boring. Pulp Fiction had conversations about milkshakes and it was way more interesting than any conversation in Inglorious Bastards. By the end his characters actions and a really intense scene between Waltz and Pitt really sucked me in and did save the movie for me. I was waiting for something to happen and there were flashes of brilliance in the movie but overall it was disappointing. The strongest point to a Tarantino movie is the dialogue along with some intense action scenes. This movie had very few of both. The very first scene of a movie is very important. Star Wars had Darth Vader's introduction. Lord of the Rings had the seven minute prologue. Pulp Fiction had the incredible conversation in the diner. This movie had nothing. I was uninterested from the very beginning. It is Waltz and a French farmer talking about nonsense and after almost ten minutes of pointless talk it gets interesting. The Frenchman was hiding Jews under the floorboards and the last minute or two of the opening scene had such a little impact because of the boring conversation. It didn't work for me. A lot of people didn't like that most of the movie wasn't in English and that it was subtitled. Now, I love subtitles. Even when a movie is 100%in English I put on subtitles. It is just a habit so subtitles didn't bother me. However, the subtitles took me out of the experience and I'm not too sure why. It made it difficult for me to connect or care with any of the characters. I got a few characters confused and a lot of them were just unimportant. There was a long scene in a bar and again, it had a good ending to the scene but the events leading up to it dragged on and on. This movie isn't suppose to be historically accurate, but this makes zero sense. The basic idea of the movie is to get a large group of Nazi leaders in a movie theatre to present a German war movie, and kill them all. It is the act of a Jew to get revenge on the Nazis with the help of Brad Pitt and the bastards. First off, Nazi leaders would never put all of their leaders in the same room, or at least they would premier in Germany and not France. Trying to sell this idea is completely crazy and you know this would never ever be possible. The ending scenes were amusing and fun to watch, as unrealistic as they were I still laughed. The final scene of the movie was terrible because I was asking myself "That's it? What happens next? That was dumb." The story wasn't finished. I feel like it was laziness by Tarantino which was unexpected. Was this movie a disaster? No, when there were action scenes they were really awesome. A huge Jew beats the skull in of a German officer and how do you not enjoy the sight of a Nazi getting demolished by a Jew? Pitt had a lot of smart dialogue and I loved his accent. The confrontation between him and Waltz was great, but it could have been so much better. This entire movie can really be summed up in a word, disappointment. Overall, Inglorious Bastards was not Tarantino's best, but it was not his worst either. I remember seeing trailers for this movie and I thought it looked stupid and I was uninterested. I then learned who Tarantino was and saw his movie and I needed to see this movie. I saw this movie because of its director but I didn't feel like I was watching one of his movies. I didn't know what I was watching but out of respect for the director I finished the movie and salvaged what I could. I did my best to enjoy this movie but it gets the WillyT A for Effort.