One of Tarantinos best

Rating: 8/10 (1 September 2017)

Inglourious Basterds is a great film and well worth the 2 and a half hours that it takes to watch this film. This film is competently edited, shot and directed with nice cinematography and the sets looking very authentic and a decent soundtrack (mostly popular songs with some score music) The real gem is the plot and characters though.
Honestly some of the best scenes in the movie are just people talking especially the scenes involving Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa. This is Hands down the best performance he has given. I don't know if that is because Tarantino wrote the part with Waltz in mind or just because Waltz is a great actor (when he is given something to do with a character).
Other actors too give colourful performances such as Brad Pitt who plays the brash douche bag LT Raine and Michael Fassbender who plays LT Hicox. They are not as prevalent as Waltz but make for interesting characters none the less. Fassbender brings a great performance to the bar scene effortlessly building suspense and having a great back and forth with the Nazi officer who is trying to reveal that Hicox is a British spy. Fassbender switches between German and English very smoothly which does not take away from the film, in fact it adds an air of authenticity to the scene. It actually is a plot point in that scene as well with the Nazis asking why Hicox has a strange German accent that is not known to them.
Something that struck me in this movie is that all the scenes of people talking at a table have a strong overtone of malice about them. For instance the first chapter with Landa and the farmer where Landa sits down drinks a glass of milk and quietly tells the farmer that he will spare his life and the life of his daughters if the farmer tells him where the Jews are hiding. That scene starts off the movie expertly and gives the audience the feel of what it would be like to be in that situation and time.
However great this film is though there are always some downsides. These downsides for me does not make this film a 10/10 for me. I think the film itself is a bit too long in my opinion. 2 and a half hours is longer than most films and there are some scenes that really are not integral to the story and serve no purpose being there.
For instance the bit where Zoller, Goebbels and his translater are having dinner and it just cuts to a scene where Goebbels is banging the translator. That scene did not need to be in there! We, the audience, do not care that he is screwing his translator as she does not appear in the rest of the film anyway and has no bearing on the plot at all.
Daniel Bruhl I really did not like in this film, He was playing Zoller and for me did not gel well with most of the scenes he was in. He came across as childish in some scenes and other scenes he was not believable as a celebrated war hero for the Nazis. Luckily the worst actors in this film, like Bruhl and Mike Myres who plays a British colonel (honestly I'm not joking, shrek plays a colonel!), are only play small parts and do not distract from the movie too much.
Overall Inglourious Basterds is a great film, not Tarantino's best but certainly one of his best. If you are thinking of watching it I urge you to do so as Hans Landa's scenes alone are worth seeing. just be in for a long film, poor secondary actors (Bruhl & Myres) and pointless cut scenes involving a translator being screwed by a Nazi film director.