Solid movie, but only a D on Tarantino's scale

Rating: 6/10 (17 November 2009)

After fantastic Kill Bill, expectations from Tarantino's next movie were naturally high and the wacky experiment called Death Proof did little to shake them. Inglorious Bastards are finally here (on DVD) and my impressions are mixed.
The plot is a typical Tarantinian affair - it's laboriously long, filled with all kinds of wacky comic-book characters and seemingly so complicated that it had to be separated into 'acts'. Yet, in its core, the story behind it is surprisingly simple and one-linear.
Here it is: the entire Nazi high command will gather in a Parisian cinema to watch the premiere of Goering's new propaganda movie. Two factions are planning to blow up the cinema and all the big shots in it - a group of allied commandos (the Bastards) with the help of a German movie star turned traitor and a secretly Jewish girl who owns the cinema.
Thus, in the course of this movie, we are introduced with the characters, we are shown the circumstances under which the girl gets to host the event, then we see a failed attempt of the Bastards to meet their contact and finally, the big night, where both plot threads converge. That's pretty much it for the plot. Not exactly mind-blowing stuff.
Of course, most Tarantino's films have generally simplistic plots, it's the details where they shine. And this is IMO, where the biggest downfall of this movie lies.
In a nutshell, the problem is that the film takes place in Europe. During the forties.
Remember all those super-interesting slang-filled conversations and pop culture references? You know, the ones that made even the non-driving parts of Death Proof kinda sorta fun? Well, imagine all the conversations being about silent films and pop stars that had died decades before you were born. And spoken mostly in German and French. Unless you're a European retro-art fan, you'll spend about 2 hours out of 2:30 squinting at subtitles and sighing under your breath.
Even worse is how thematically dull all these speech scenes are. More than 90% of them involve the good guys forced into an interaction with the bad guys (usually this one creepy SS officer nicknamed 'the Jew Hunter'), where they desperately struggle to keep the charade going. What does the German know? Is he on to us? Uhh, the tension! Whew, he's leaving. No wait, he's back. etc... rinse and repeat 5 or 6 times, over about 70% of the movie time.
Neither of these two problems would be much of an issue on their own. It's Tarantino, for gods sake, great convos is what he does the best. However, combined, they do tend to dull the interest, especially during the second part of the movie.
The action and gore scenes are excellently produced (easily on level with Kill Bill), but they do little to shake things up as there's so little of them. Actually, now that I think about it, the film doesn't have even ONE REAL HONEST ACTION SCENE. All the shooting is either mutually destructive or one-sided, while the gore is inflicted mostly on helpless victims. A real shame, considering how good those few bits we've seen are.
That said, the characters, the back-stories and all the little touches and details are pure Tarantino, which is to say, they're excellent! Brad Pitt did kind of crappy job, but everyone else were very good, especially the aforementioned creepy nazi.
The best thing is the ending (and here we go neck deep into the SPOILER territory). Remember all those WWII movies where the good guys make all these plans to kill Hitler and stop the war, but you sort of know they'll somehow screw up in the end? Well forget about that crap here. Inglorious Bastards ends up wading heavily into the alternate universe territory, with a cathartic release of lead, fire and all sorts of other deadly things into Hitler and his pals. Pretty sweet ending and something we've seen too rarely (or never?) in WWII movies.
Overall, not the worst Tarantino's effort, but nowhere near the best.