a to b to c movie mash up that only fails to convince when you don't give in

Rating: 7/10 (14 September 2009)

From what I've seen in the trailers that have been leaked in the internet early this year I didn't expect that much from this film. There has been some hype in the local Berlin press last autumn while the crew was filming in Potsdam and in Saxony which was kind of getting annoying (i.e. "look where Brad and Quentin and Til (! the German version of Brad Pitt without the acting skills) had their night out" etc.) and the choice of German actor's for supporting roles seemed odd, because some of them are today's B-movie guys. Unlike Pam Grier or Kurt Russell who stand for a specific time and convey some kind of 'cult' feel because of the weird quality of the B-movies they starred in back in the 70s and 80s, here we have some German TV-actors who stand for, well, not that much... especially not for the majority of viewers who have never seen them before... and it's amazing to see that some of these actors can pull off a decent performance because they are directed by someone who is very talented and knows the abilities and limits of his cast (well, Eli Roth might be an exception)
It was unlike what I have expected. There were great dialogues, sometimes a bit too long, sometimes a bit self-indulgent, most of the time great performances (thank God Tarrantino himself didn't show up) and suspense despite logical flaws (logic's not that important here though). Waltz (who I have hardly ever noticed before) and Melanie Laurent (so so beautiful) great discoveries, Pitt actually funny in a trashy kind of way. There are strange intellectual shifts where you have to concentrate and suddenly afterwards just throw everything (including your brain) overboard. If you are not willing to give yourself in to this 'cinematic experiment' (sounds awful, I couldn't come up with a different expression) and watch accordingly, I can totally understand all the one-star raters who find this film boring, unnecessarily violent (the baseball bat scene: I think you don't have to be emotionally dead to NOT take this seriously) pretentious and arbitrary.
Oddly enough, I found myself strangely satisfied by the slaughter towards the end... it obviously had this payback feeling of 80s violent street gang or Chuck Norris movies, it was obviously silly that the evil Nazi viewers who have laughed at the dying American soldiers in that ridiculously stupid film just 2 minutes before (very funny I thought) are now dying themselves and are being laughed at by us watching the film (believe me, as a German you really want to see Hitler or Goebbels being finally shot because they still haunt you even when you were born long after they died... you want to kill them for you having to feel uncomfortable with your nationality and destroying it's rep and history within just 12 years)... and it's odd to get this childish or primitive feeling of satisfying revenge. Interesting.