"Inglourious" (sic) Is Right!

Rating: 1/10 (25 August 2009)

"Overrated" and "boring as hell." These are the words that kept coming to mind during the three hours of monotony that my friends recommended to me as "amazing." Either they were lying to me, they saw a different "Inglourious Basterds", or I'm the only one who can see that the emperor is naked.
I enjoyed the three previous Quentin Tarantino films I've seen, "Pulp Fiction", "Reservoir Dogs", and "Death Proof." Not much happens, but there's a certain theatricality to the way Tarantino's often-nonlinear stories unfold.
"Basterds" has all of the Tarantino trademarks: long stretches of mundane, but amusing, dialogue, larger than life characters, and occasional splatters of gore. But in his previous films, Tarantino was able to pull all this off with more panache. Every heavily-subtitled (most of the dialogue is either in German or French) scene drags its feet for what seems like forever, and only sometimes does the dialogue even approach being interesting. The plot, little there is, is divided into episodic chapters like a 1940's "Pulp Fiction." But this time, Tarantino exchanges depth for period detail, as if the historical significance of WWII will make up for all of the movie's shortcomings. The Basterds of the title, a team of Jewish American soldiers infiltrating German-occupied France to take brutal revenge on Nazi soldiers, actually get only a small percentage of the screen time. Most of the chapters focus on the film's German and French characters.
While Tarantino's previous efforts were made up of characters that started out resembling pulp creations and then grew in terms of complexity, all of the characters in "Basterds", both heroes and villains, are as flat as cardboard from beginning to end. This wouldn't be such a bad thing if the film was an action movie like the trailers seemed to suggest. But "Basterds" is completely dialogue and character driven. 90% of the movie is people having conversation while sitting at tables.
While "Pulp Fiction" featured an all-star cast led by Samuel L. Jackson (who lends his voice to "Basterds" as a narrator for a couple brief moments) and Bruce Willis, "Basterds" eschews stars for lesser known international character actors. Not to say any of them are bad actors. Christoph Waltz, Daniel Bruhl, and the haunting, enchanting Melanie Laurent are actually quite good. But none of them are able to entertain for any reasonable amount of time with the flat characters and even flatter dialogue they are given to work with. Diane Kruger ("National Treasure") is pushed to the background for most of her scenes. Brad Pitt, effortlessly evoking a lazy Tennessee accent, is entertaining every minute he's on screen, but those minutes are actually few and far between. The most entertaining performance actually comes from Mike Myers, in one scene in the middle of "Basterds", as a British General.
In the end, "Inglourious Basterds" is more boring than any film about a plot to assassinate Hitler has a right to be and offers little to the cinema other than a title that rolls off the tongue nicely.