A Wild Ride

Rating: 9/10 (11 April 2012)

Inglorious Basterds might be Quentin Tarantino's most complicated story line yet. World War II is the setting and it opens at at a French farmhouse where the owner is suspected of hiding Jews. He is interrogated by a Nazi Colonel Hans Landa; played by Christoph Waltz in an Oscar winning performance both chilling and hilarious at the same time. After denials, a hidden family is given up and one, Shosanna, escapes.
Brad Pitt is Lieutenant Aldo Raine, and his mission is to recruit eight Jewish-American soldiers to sneak behind enemy lines and kill as many Germans as possible. He requests 100 scalps as trophies from each man. Pitt is over the top in an almost comic book fashion, but this is Tarantino's baby.
In the meantime, Shosanna has become a French woman named Emmanuelle who owns a movie theater in Paris. She meets Zoller, a German hero who is the subject of a Lenin Riefenstal type of propaganda film and he introduces her to Joseph Goebbels and she offers her theater for the premiere of the movie, with the plan to assemble as many higher ups as possible in order to kill them in retaliation for the massacre of her family.
The last chapter is classic Tarantino, a complete fantasy with the Nazi's looking like Hogan's Heroes. Revenge is sweet and so is Inglorious Basterds.