Every bit as crazy, bloody, and awesome as expected

Rating: 9/10 (7 December 2014)

So Quinton Terantino, best known for his gangster and martial arts films, has decided to make a war movie. At first I wasn't sure how I felt about the idea. He's one of my favorite directors, but I had to question whether pop culture references and the Second World War make a good match. I am glad to say that this film exceeded my expectations. Terantino has crafted the best revenge fantasy since Kill Bill. He's wisely left out the pop culture nods and insider references (besides a few allusions to early German cinema) but has all of his usual wit, penchant for dialog, and over the top violence.
The basic setup is that 'Aldo the Apache' (Brad Pitt) an eccentric OSS lieutenant, has recruited eight Jewish young men to form a guerrilla unit that will raise havoc behind the German lines using the most brutal methods possible. He makes it clear in his opening speech that he expects each of them to take 100 Nazi scalps. Oh, and as anyone who's watched any of the trailers knows, they do get to kill Hitler. Anyway, back to the scalping, we get to see plenty, a few of them at very close distance. There are also many, many shootings, a strangling, a massive fire, and explosions aplenty. At times there are so many gun barrels spouting fire and so many bodies falling that it's like a veritable orgy of violence, with too many elements for the eye to take in. In other scenes, time slows, the focus narrows, and we see every drop of blood fly as the bat strikes the head of a Nazi. It's as graphic and blood drenched as any of Terantino's works, and beyond what most would consider good taste, but still well short of the type of gore-fest that's been so prevalent in horror films as of late.
And in between the bursts of violence, Terantino delivers sustained periods of tension and the type of insightful, realistic conversations that viewers have come to expect from him. In regards to the former, the opening scene at the French farmhouse is a masterpiece in its own right. As the scene progresses, the tension grows and thicker and thicker until you can practically cut it with a knife. (Pardon the cliché) We don't know until the last minute how the scene will end, but the longer it goes on, the more certain you become that it can't possibly end well. Coming in a close second is the conversation in the Parisian Bistro between a Jewish cinema proprietor and the SS officer who killed her family.
Even when the point is to create tension or provide the lead in to a shoot out, the dialog is brilliant. As in any Terantino movie, what a character says and how he says it can tell you every bit as much about a character as his actions. In the farmhouse scene, it's apparent that the SS officer is every bit as intelligent and cultured as he is evil; the perfect villain. And the German war hero's early attempts to woo the secretly Jewish young woman are as earnest and awkward as any in real life. Reminds me of experiences I've had- up until it starts getting creepy.
Aside from the SS major and the war hero, most of the Nazis in this movie are little more than caricatures, affirmations of all we know about the evils of the Reich. Goebbels comes off as a buffoonish hack director, this Hitler does little more than give a few perfunctory rants, and I'm not sure if Goering and Bormann had any lines. But that doesn't matter, since they're only in the movie to be loathsome and to die. Hatred is of course a base emotion, and normally the vilification of any large group is a great injustice. But with Nazis that's simply not an issue. They showed such callousness and committed so many atrocities that anyone without a passionate hatred of them and all they stood for would be considered an outlier. So in a revenge picture, the more one dimensional and disgusting you make them, the better.
There's no denying that the violence and language earn this a fairly hard R rating, and it appeals to a side of human nature that many of us would like to ignore. But that's the point really. After all, this is a Quinton Tarantino production, and honestly, who hasn't wished they could kill a Nazi at some point? It may not quite be Pulp fiction, but trust me, it's bloody good fun.