A disgusting travesty

Rating: 1/10 (30 August 2009)

This is a disgusting travesty of a film that does its best to re-imagine the Holocaust as a comic book that was conceived by a 12-year old boy. There are a myriad of films that portray World War II in a fanciful light, but "Inglorious Basterds" is one of the few that I can recall that uses the extermination of the Jews as a launching pad for an outlandish Sam Peckenpaugh -inspired cartoon which depicts historical figures like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels - monsters who were responsible for the murder of millions of people - on the same level as Lex Luthor or The Joker.
Brad Pitt and his crew of seemingly invincible marauders cut through the German lines with such ease that it's a wonder that the war lasted as long as it did, and with such a sadistic bloodthirstiness that they seemed likely subjects for a war crimes trial at the conflict's end. Tarantino crudely and artlessly tries to take the narrative between their bloody and far-fetched "heroics" and more genuine atrocities suffered by victims of the Nazis, so the line between Tarantino's outlandish fairy tale and the real-life horrors of the Holocaust are blurred to a degree that made me feel like the director was exploiting the brutal death of six million people in order to splash a lot of cool, fake blood on a movie set. That's perfectly fine if you're making a flight of fantasy like "Kill Bill", but the blood that was spilled in the Holocaust wasn't supplied by Hollywood special effects wizards and deserves more respect than it's given here.