Interesting....

Rating: 7/10 (19 August 2009)

I long ago stopped believing Tarantino's publicity, and I approached IB (if I may refer to it as such) with trepidation. And I must say that whatever his faults - and they become clearer with each subsequent film - Tarantino never fails to present a piece of work which is startlingly individual.
IB is a case in point. The story is an interesting, unusual war story. It starts with Gestapo Col Hans Landa (a fabulous performance by Christoph Waltz) killing a Jewish family but allowing daughter Shosanna to escape. Then we meet the Basterds, a group of eight Jewish American soldiers lead by half-Apache Brad Pitt, whose brief is to go behind enemy lines and slaughter Nazis. We jump ahead in time to a point where Shosanna now owns and runs a cinema in Paris. When the cinema unexpectedly becomes the venue for a movie to be watched by all the German high command, she determines to set fire to the place with them all trapped inside. Unknown to her, both British intelligence and the Basterds are involved in a similar scheme....
There are some excellent elements to this movie. Christoph Waltz, as noted above, is one - both amusing and chilling. Diane Kruger, as German actress Briget von Hammersmark is another. The sequence in the bar is brilliant. And the proper languages are used, subtitled (with several cast members showing themselves to be fluently multilingual), with over two thirds of the film taking part in French and/or German.
Now let's examine what is not so good.
Shosanna's escape shows elements of a set-up for something which never materialises. A number of aspects of the ending don't really play fair with the audience (characters who die, and those who survive, contrary to audience preferences, plus the actual ending itself). There are some downright bizarre music choices. Brad Pitt is awful, playing a character directed (but not written) so broadly that he may as well have been playing panto - he seems to be trying to channel a comedy version of Marlon Brando in The Godfather, and his gurning is painful to watch. I found the whole interplay between violence and humour difficult to deal with - one sequence with someone being beaten to death with a baseball bat had the audience laughing.
And the film is far too long - it could usefully be cut by an hour (the opening sequence takes 20 minutes and needs only 5).
But I had no trouble with rewriting the end of the war - the "Once upon a time" at the start makes it clear that this is a fairy tale.