Schlock and Awe.

Rating: 3/10 (14 August 2010)

It's one of those movies that's difficult to evaluate because it's as inconsistent as it is. The plot is ludicrous yet there are very suspenseful moments embedded in it. Nobody could have made this except Quentin Tarantino -- it's that original -- and yet it rips off bits of business and entire subplots from a dozen or more other sources.
Any enthusiasm I felt for it is limited because some scenes -- the entirety of "Chapter One" -- approach a kind of pornography of torture that's in danger of becoming a genre unto itself, and Tarantino, the writer and director, seems to get too much of a kick out what is some pretty ugly stuff.
Brad Pitt is an American officer with an atrocious mountain accent who recruits a half dozen men to be inserted into France with the object of killing Nazis. The men are Jewish. The reasoning goes: the Nazis kill Jews, therefore we will kill Nazis. The collateral killing of any innocents is beside the point. The innocent must be punished along with the guilty. See "The Dirty Dozen" is you want a classier presentation of this moral nihilism.
Not only do Pitt and his men kill the Nazis they capture. They scalp them too, and Tarantino treats the audience several times to explicit scenes of the men slicing the scalps of hair from the skulls of the dead.
One captured officer is told to indicate where his unit is and how well armed and refuses, saying he will not yield information that will endanger the lives of German soldiers. There's a scene in "Reservoir Dogs," in which Michael Madsen is left alone with an innocent policeman and caresses his razor as he describes the pleasure he's going to get from torturing the prisoner. In "Reservoir Dogs," Madsen is the sadistic madman and the cop is the terrified captive who winds up being mutilated. In "Inglorious Bastards," the German officer who refuses to give up the information is told he will have his brains beaten out by a Jew wielding a baseball bat -- "The Bear Jew." The scene is long and drawn out. The camera cuts between the blackness of the cave from with The Bear Jew will emerge -- we hear the bat banging against the wall and coming close -- and close ups of the horrified face of the officer awaiting his own death. The horror is justified. The point is that the sadistic lunatic of "Reservoir Dogs" has become the hero now.
Well -- what's the point of this scene? Just killing the recalcitrant officer is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. But why draw the scene out with such relish? What does Tarantino expect from the viewer? Chills, thrills -- exaltation -- during the anticipation of the grisly murder? LAUGHTER? That's the kind of crap I'd expect in a cheap slasher movie before the pretty girl in the underwear gets her throat cut and blood splashes all over the walls.
"Pulp Fiction" was a true original, even if it was a couple of sub-plots slapped together. "Reservoir Dogs" had some fine acting, though it ended pointlessly. Both were essentially well-done in their own shocking ways.
But I can't forgive Tarantino for this one. I don't mind the in-jokes. (The name of Pitt's officer is "Aldo Raine.") There is even some intentional comedy that works. Pitt is trying to pass himself off as a native Italian, and you ought to hear him mangle the word "arrivederci." But not even the scenes that embody suspense, the genuinely well-staged episode in the basement night club, can lift this effort out of the teen-aged trash can.
Good performances for the most part, especially from Melanie Laurent who is unmistakably French, Christoph Waltz as the chief Nazi villain, and Daniel Bruhl as the fresh-faced young German hero who is given some inexplicable and uncharacteristically villainous lines just before he's done in.
The climax is a fantasy, which is okay, but there are signs of outright carelessness in the direction. (I don't want to call it stupidity.) The audience of high-ranking Nazis is sitting there watching a movie about a heroic sniper and everyone -- der Fuhrer included -- is laughing out loud as hundreds of American soldiers are shot and killed in a strictly Hollywood manner, twirling around, stunt men tumbling down stairs, anachronistic squibs exploding. Does anyone actually believe that an audience of sophisticates would laugh during a movie like this? Or -- let me put it differently. We made the same kind of movie, "To Hell And Back," in which Audie Murphy played his historically heroic self and slaughtered hundreds of Germans. Did anyone laugh?
Tarantino unquestionably has a lot of movie-making skill. Maybe it's time for him to reconsider the parameters of his morality.