A series of cameos rather than a history.

Rating: 7/10 (7 March 2012)

I am not a fan of Tarantino's (I got a third of the way into Kill Bill before I decided it was trash) nor of extreme violence or shlock, so I approached this film with some trepidation. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were only a couple of scenes with the actual "Basterds" themselves being "ruthless", indeed, they could almost have been omitted from the film without affecting it. The show was stolen by Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa, with excellent performances by Mélanie Laurent as Shosanna Dreyfus and Diane Kruger as Bridget von Hammersmark. Landa's mixture of creepy humour and immense intelligence has all the attractiveness of a hypnotic cobra, and the scenes in the small-holding, in the party where he comes face to face with Shoshanna for the second time, and in the cinema with von Hammersmark are sufficient reason to give the film a decent rating, together with the cliff-hanger basement scene. Brad Pitt is absolutely hopeless, his characterisation makes no sense and his acting is bizarre. Apart from the scenes mentioned above, the film varies around the mediocre, but was always watchable, except for the mutilation and baseball-bat scenes, which were entirely prurient, unnecessary, and should disgust any right- thinking person. If your side in a war sinks to that kind of level, well, you've lost.