Mediocre.

Rating: 5/10 (5 December 2009)

We love Tarantino for his humor don't we. And how he weaves B class cinema and TV nostalgia into his films. And it does work really great, as long as it's about LA street thugs. As soon as he leaves the city though, and even more so when leaving the continent, his style unfortunately becomes rather a limitation than an asset.
I won't go into all the details. Because as soon as you see a bunch of SS guys approaching a house in France mixed with an italo spaghetti western style music score you'll realize it's gonna be ... stranded. The whole thing lying almost dead on the shore, hardly breathing before it all even really started.
So it's basically a fairy tale of the "what if" kind with two story lines. The basterds and Shosanna. The former is plain pitiful, which I myself wouldn't attribute to Pitt. I mean he's sure not a great actor, never has been. But I think he did OK with the material he was given, which in itself was poor. Nazi scalps, Apache style. How funny.
The Shosanna thread is the more elaborate and not that bad. Thanks to some pretty nice casting. The names to mention here would be Daniel Brühl and Christoph Waltz. Where the latter delivers the first remotely believable SS officer I've ever seen in an American financed movie, in my entire life. Kudos also to Tarantino here, for giving him the freedom. Also, if you want to see what a professional actor with proper stage experience can really do, Waltz is an example. Mélanie Laurent and Diane Kruger are both great too.
Still, the old trauma. Why can't we have top ranking Nazis portrayed realistically? Hollywood must be afraid that people could like them, especially when shown as they were in their prime time. So what we got here again is Goebbels and Hitler as clownish parodies, but listless as such. Obviously, Tarantino didn't dare to compete with Chaplin, who had the advantage of not knowing yet what Nazi Deutschland really was about. On the other hand, he didn't have the courage to go entirely realistic either. Outcome being: nothing. And boring as hell on top.
All this merely as a warning. To not expect too much, because this film effectively is lame. Besides the points mentioned above, the actors, I'd give it some points for nice cinematography and stuff, and amiable self referential cinema blah of the nouvelle vague kind. Where back then a large part of the films was about making films. Which might translate to: a large part of Tarantino films is about Tarantino films. OK sorry, that was a nasty thing to say.
Still, Tarantino did make a notable step towards showing halfway believable Nazi characters, in the shape of an SS officer and a Volksheld. Given the Anglo-American film history regarding the subject this might already be considered a major achievement. I wished he had gone whole length though. But if he had, the result likely wouldn't have sold that well. So welcome again to the American film industry.