Easily forgettable

Rating: 5/10 (11 March 2010)

Inglorious Basterds is yet another flashy exercise in pulp excess taking liberties as much with history as accents. Pitt and co play the titular basterds who operate behind enemy lines scalping Nazis (Pitt demands 100 scalps per member of his unit) culminating in a plot to wipe out the nazi hierarchy at a Parisian film premiere. Unbeknowknst to them the cinema's owner is plotting almost precisely the same thing. Eventually the 2 groups' paths collide in the film's explosive cinematic climax. Personally, i didn't enjoy it much, nor was there much chance I was going to as the thought of Tarantino directing a war film fills me with bemusement - like Leone directing a comedy. His overwrought self-satisfied style is all over this like the cream on the strudel in one restaurant scene. Every scene is planned to look and sound as cool as possible, removing any semblance of naturalism from the product in the process. The table conversations that fill the majority of the runtime never sound like a conversation people do or would actually have, rather they're pure script delivered by actors who sound only like they are delivering lines. The emotional vacuum in these scenes and others runs to the heart of what's wrong with what promised from its beginnings to have some substance to it yet with conversational emotion understated out of existence and the emotionless murders that make up the film's action there's nothing left for the viewer to latch on to. We're never supposed to empathise with anyone in the film because we're never given the chance, everyone is a basterd in this - the women perhaps moreso than the men and no one wins in the end. Nihilism? Not quite. Just a film that starts slowly, never gets out of a canter then gets lost along the way choosing to retire early rather than finish the race. Not the best couple of hours i've ever spent by any stretch.