It's Killin' Nazis Time

Rating: 10/10 (23 May 2010)

Remember those Old Italian spaghetti westerns. You have your villain causing some problems and then you have your anti-hero come in and clean things up. Well, try picturing that in a World War 2 setting where your baddie is an officer in the SS nicknamed the Jew Hunter and your hero is a Jewish American soldier who has dropped into Nazi Occupied France with a band of other Jewish American soldiers on a mission to kill every Nazi he can find before the invasion of Normandy Begins.
Now to be honest, this sounds like one of two things. Either some small European director wants to create a 'nazisploitation' film or Quentin Tarantino is back with him most absurd idea yet. If you guessed the second you were right. QT is back with a spaghetti western set in Nazi Occupied France.
Our villain the Jew Hunter is played with skill by Christoph Waltz. He opens the film by going to a small dairy farming family living in south France. He begins interviewing the father of the family about the Jewish dairy farmers who lived in the area before the occupation. Through witty and intimidating conversation he gets the father to give up the location (under the floorboards) of the family Dreyfus who he has been protecting.
Next we meet our heroes. The Basterds, as they're known, are led by Brad Pit as Lt. Aldo 'the Apache' Raines into France dressed as civilians. With the gang we have: Sgt Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), known by German soldiers as the 'Bear Jew' and is famous for beating Nazi soldiers heads in with a baseball bat; Sgt Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), famous for killing 13 SS officers before being captured; Cpl. Wilhelm Wicki (Gedeon Burkhard), an Austrian who escaped after his family was killed and joined the Basterds to get some good old fashioned revenge. When we first see them in France they have just ambushed a German platoon and have begun scalping the dead (each Basterd owes Raines 100 Nazi scalps) when the survivors are brought out. The German sergeant is brought forward and is offered survival by Raines for the position of another platoon. After refusing, Donny comes out and beats his head in (on screen) with a baseball bat. Then the youngest, and now only, survivor is brought forward and gives the location up. Right when he thinks he'll be allowed to escape unscathed he is asked what he will do with his uniform after the war. He says that he'll burn it. Wrong answer kid. The Basterds like their Nazi's in uniform. So to make sure that he will always be recognized as a Nazi, Aldo paints a little picture on his head with his knife.
As you can guess because it is a Tarantino film there has to be at least one other plot line involved. The third in Inglourious is about the left over member of the Dreyfus family, Shoshanna, and what she does after her family is massacred by Landa. Two years after the massacre, Shoshanna is operating a cinema in Paris under the name Emmanuelle Mimieux. One day, a hero German sniper walks by the cinema and feels an attraction for her. He attempts to ask her out but is stopped at every step. Eventually he talks to the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbles and asks him to change the premier of his new film to Shoshanna's cinema. Those are the three stories and with typical Tarantino style, he intertwines them beautifully. It all comes to a close at the movie premier.
The greatest thing about this film is the dialogue. First off, it is in most of the languages spoken at the time (French, German, Italian) not just English. This does mean that a lot of the dialogue is seen in subtitles. Despite this, the actors say their lines with conviction and the dialogue keeps you enticed with its playfulness. It is filled with a lot of the beautiful pointless dialogue that Tarantino films are famous for.
The thing that I have avoided mentioning until this point is the violence of the film. This film is very very violent. Violent and graphic. It is not for children (well no QT film is). The scalping I mentioned before is shown right on screen and when Donny beats the Nazi sergeant's head in, it is very graphic and there are no camera tricks used to make it less shocking.
Without a doubt this is one of the best films of 2009. It is funny and suspenseful, charming and insane. It has all the elements that you'd expect from a QT film and easily the greatest villain in the history of his movies. It is no surprise that Waltz won every acting award he was nominated for. He was everything I mentioned above and more. He was ruthless and he made the film the best it could be.