Interesting, but not the "New Dirty Dozen" action film its advertising purports

Rating: 6/10 (14 September 2009)

"Inglourious Basterds" is an interesting film, but not really a satisfying one. It has the ideas and framework of a cracking 1960's style WWII action spectacle, along the lines of "The Dirty Dozen" or "Where Eagles Dare," (Or even Italy's "Inglorious Bastards" from which the new film gains its name). But the long sequences that make up IG are really more like outtakes from a Hollywood film. It's as though Tarantinio is presenting the conversations that happened in the big budget 1960s WWII action epic when the camera wasn't on. In that way, it is actually much more like his first commercial feature "Reservoir Dogs"--long dialog sequences punctuated by violent outbursts; all surface style, no deep characterization; incredibly entertaining dialog, but way too much of it, etc.
I had very high hopes after the first sequence, a very skillful lift of the prolonged yet tense opening sequence from Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West." But I was soon to find out that the film was just going to be one such sequence after another, each less effective than the last simply due to the repetition. There were no real themes developed, the Basterds (except for Pitt's cartoony "Psychotic Andy Taylor") were basically faceless and uninteresting, and the whole thing was unfocused and unbalanced. But even so, the dialog scenes were entertaining while they were taking place—it's just that they served absolutely no other purpose than momentary amusement. It would have been really cool if Tarrantino had collaborated with someone who could have integrated the best of his conversational sparring sequences into an actual story.