What's worse than having to listen to 2 1/2 hours of Tarantino dialog?

Rating: 5/10 (20 August 2011)

The answer: Having to READ about 2 hours of it! Yes, the man is talented. And yes, there are parts of this overly-lengthy film that are terrific, but I've just come to the point where the thrill is gone. Gone is my appetite for Tarantino's style with excessive homages to an era of films I never saw, and neither did many of his hard-core fans. Gone (if it ever was truly there) is my desire for endless conversations that seldom lead anywhere or advance what little plot his films often have. It's all pretty much gone. Tarantino has been doing this to us for almost twenty years now, and its time that either himself or myself moves on.
Inglourious Basterds is marketed to the masses as somewhat of a revenge film about Jewish commandos slaughtering Nazi troops behind enemy lines with Brad Pitt as their leader. Some of this lengthy film will in fact actually deal with that story line. But so much more of it is window dressing with long, subtitled conversations in either French or German. Many of our characters are not believable... even in a Tarantino universe. Nothing we see is plausible. And very little of it is tense. Many have pointed to Christoph Waltz's portrayal of a kind of SS detective as being the lone good aspect of this film. That's pretty much the case. This guy grabs the film and runs away with it. Pitt is tolerable for once, but his character doesn't have to do much in terms of acting range. Thank Goodness. Diane Kruger has some nice moments, and its good to see her in something other than National Treasure movies. I guess... watch if you must, but this is not the director's best work. His breed of film peaked with the Kill Bill movies, and it isn't clear if he is capable of doing anything that isn't just a patchwork of what others have done. Inglourious Basterds is a long, talky waste of 153 minutes. Its few good scenes aren't enough to justify the rest. 5 of 10 stars.
The Hound.