Inglourious Basterds is an Expertly Written Time Bomb. The Blast is Worth the Wait.

Rating: 9/10 (26 November 2019)

The importance of a good ending cannot be overstated. Take the case of Quentin Tarantino's nazi revenge fantasy, Inglourious Basterds. The majority of the 6th film by Tarantino is talky, a bit slow, not quite as thrilling as you might expect from Quentin. But even if these early scenes, as literate, beautifully shot, and tense as many of them are, don't grab you completely, they serve as foundation to what becomes one of the most daring, insane, masterful endings of all-time.
The movie is told in four chapters. Chapter One is a prologue of sorts introducing us to the two main players in the story, Hans Landa, The Jew Hunter, and Shosanna, an escaped Jewish girl who eventually inherits a Parisian cinema. It's a classic showcase for Tarantino dialogue, with two men at a table playing the most subtle of mind games with each other. It's also the first chance for Christoph Waltz to show off the joie de vivre he brings to Landa, a highly intelligent nazi hitman. Chapters Two through Four are also slow, dialogue-driven set-up pieces. The Basterds are introduced, Brad Pitt's team of Jewish soldiers, Hellbent on murdering as many Nazis as they can before the war ends. So is Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a German war hero and star of A Nation's Pride, the fictional propaganda film created for this movie. Lastly comes a British spy unit, headed by Michael Fassbender's scene-stealing Lt. Archie Hicox and German actress-turned-double-agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). As the plot moves forward, we realize that each thread is leading to the same place, the Nazi premiere for A Nation's Pride.
With Tarantino's dialogue propping them up, and these actors filling them with such vitality, the scenes building up to Chapter Five are never less than watchable. A Tarantino scene cannot go on too long. In this film, even the mundane things, the eating of strudels or the playing of a card game, are laced with multiple layers of tension. It's hard to explain good dialogue except to say that when it has the rhythm and colorful vocabulary of Tarantino's does, you don't want it to stop. Also watchable are the performances, with standout turns from the aforementioned Christoph Waltz and Michael Fassbender. Waltz is the main acting attraction, oozing a kind of satisfied mastery over the art of evil. He is stunning from the get go. But Fassbender is the overlooked gem of the bunch, in a small part that he makes brilliantly large. His dutiful British agent is a fabulous creation, smart, sophisticated, and intimidating. He bloody rocks!
Then comes Chapter Five, Revenge of the Giant Face. What a ride these last twenty minutes or so are. Perceptive viewers may feel they know precisely what's going to happen come the big premiere. The revenge plot/war-ending sabotage mission is spelled out along the way, lighting the fuse for an eventual explosion. The genius of this script is that just when we are finally ready to sit back and watch the fireworks, things begin to change directions in ways we didn't see coming. Surprise after surprise left me awe-struck (One such moment happens to be one of the best laugh lines of recent memory, "Grazie!"). It's a cascading wave of resolutions that seem to come out of nowhere, yet we realize were totally inevitable. Of course there is also delirious, shocking violence, and some terrifying, iconic, monumental imagery. These images sear themselves into your memory for weeks. The whole film is exquisitely photographed by Robert Richardson, but the ending rises to another level entirely. For a film to coast along for two hours as a buttoned-up suspense yarn, only to evolve rapidly into a work of insane madness, it had to have been made by a filmmaker as creatively liberated as Quentin Tarantino. So many directors, even the great ones, work off existing templates. They accomplish certain goals with skill. Tarantino makes his own goals and his own methods of reaching them.
Like a great magic act, Inglourious Basterds lulls us into trusting our own intuition, before revealing something utterly unexpected. If you were to only watch through Chapter Four, Basterds would seem like a disparate collection of stories loosely tied together with thematic similarities. The movie would be a suitably tense, very well-constructed, middle-of-the-road war picture. It's that balls-to-the-wall madness of Chapter Five that retroactively infuses the rest of the film with significance. After being blown away by a swift burst of provocative violence, all of a sudden, Inglourious Basterds is a whole lot more interesting.
94/100