Masterpiece? Guess again...

Rating: 4/10 (2 September 2009)

Firstly, I want to make one thing clear:
I'm German but I don't have a problem with Germans being the bad guys in movies. The depiction of Germans in this movie didn't offend me. There were lots of other reasons for me not to like Inglourious Basterds.
I didn't have high expectations, but still it was very disappointing. I was surprised how little action this had and how boring it all was. The plot is very thin and there are a lot of absolutely pointless and painfully long scenes. Some may be fooled by this into thinking the movie actually had depth. But I think Tarantino really didn't know what he was doing. Despite the huge amount of dialogue the characters remained one dimensional and boring (with maybe one or two exceptions).
The violence in-between all that boredom seemed misplaced, unnecessary and therefor really disgusted me. Want an example? There's a scene where a German officer gets brutally beaten to death with a baseball bat for not providing strategic information. He was only protecting his fellow soldiers and was actually very brave. Are we supposed to think this is perfectly acceptable because he was a Nazi? Or was this even supposed to be funny?
This movie also failed from an artistic point of few. The direction and camera work was underwhelming at best. The music was horrible and didn't fit at all. Overall, there wasn't any consistent style to this movie, just a lot of pieces that didn't match.
I'd rate this even lower if it weren't for Christoph Waltz's great performance as Hans Landa and a few good laughs. This is a highly overrated mediocre B-movie at best. And for me it's more proof that Tarantino isn't the great writer/director everybody took him for after Pulp Fiction. 4 out of 10.