A mediocre effort from Tarantino. Nothing but a pastiche of films and silly sitcom dialog

Rating: 5/10 (21 August 2009)

I saw Inglourious Basterds at a midnight screening and I was unimpressed with the movie. Seems like Tarantino has run out of ideas and sharp dialog. He promised a war movie in the style of an Italian western. All I saw was a pastiche of Italian westerns, bad humor and long drawn out dialog that lacked any of his previous films unique wit. Being a fan of pop culture Tarantino peppers the script with a lot of it from the 30's and 40's (yes it seems really forced). If you have seen a lot of Italian westerns, then you'll know what you're in for. Long panning camera shots, close ups of eyes and even longer wide shots. The actions scenes are few and scattered throughout the film. What I really didn't like about the film itself was that it's too helter skelter. One minute it's serious and the second it's silly with a lot of inane dialog and boring chatter that took over ten years to write (according to QT)..
The characters were not that interesting. Shoshana (played by Melanie Laurent) is the main character and the film centers around her involvement in the underground. She come off cold and not all that interesting. Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz) is the "Jew Hunter" but he comes off like a Teutonic Columbo (I kid you not) and really mugs and overacts for the camera. The Basterds (led by Brad Pitt as Aldo Raine) are marketed as being the central characters of the film. But their appearances are too few and far between. Pitt's character's accent and personality comes off cartoonish and it really doesn't work. Eli Roth is not a very good actor and his character "The Bear Jew"is very wooden. He's a good filmmaker who should stay behind the camera. Mike Myers guest role as a British officer is pretty bad and the audience was laughing along every time he spoke.
I wish the movie was made as a farce but I don't think that was Tarantino's intentions. He tried to make a "spaghetti western war movie". But it comes off like a real pedestrian effort that's caters to an audience that's not his. This film felt like his first ever mainstream movie. I was really stunned by how bad this movie is. The lighting is real annoying. I know Robert Richardson loves the whole "halo light" thing but it can be very distracting. The QT fan boys will fall all over themselves for this one because when he says jump they always say "how high?" I don't know how well this movie will do at he box office but what I do know is that he needs a hit big time to re coop the money lost for Grindhouse (which I really enjoyed). Tarantino used to fire on all cylinders, even in his so-so movies (Kill Bill Vol.2) but this one has my scratching my head going "what the hell did I just watch?"
Several of Tarantino's trademarks appear in this film such as "The Mexican Stand-Off", pop culture references (albeit 30's and 40's), a bare foot scene (QT has a well known foot fetish) and the n-bomb is dropped a few times in the film (don't ask how they managed to work that into the movie).