A repellent, amoral waste of talent

Rating: 2/10 (7 September 2009)

This is an entertaining film, sustaining interest for 150 minutes and including a number of scenes in which tension is built and savoured very effectively. There are also some strong performances, although I think some of the praise for the very good Christoph Waltz has been a bit OTT.
You can't really enjoy it, though, unless you think there is no morality at all in art or that it's okay for an aesthetic of brutality to serve (wittingly or unwittingly) an ethic of brutality. Tarantino glories not only in violence but in cruelty - he invites us to laugh at and approve of deliberate disfigurement as well as a savage murder, both of which would have been war crimes had they happened in reality and neither of which is required by the plot or even serves it. It's gratuitous. And impliedly justified by the fact that they were inflicted on "Nazis", with the clear implication that each and every German soldier in occupied France was a committed and genocidal Nazi who deserved to be brutally killed or disfigured. So that's okay then. Kewl.
I don't doubt that Tarantino has talent - but this such a waste of it. Nasty and cynical, with inhuman overtones, all masked by a veneer of knowing irony. Horrid.