Tragically, this is probably as good as Taratino will ever again be

Rating: 6/10 (23 July 2010)

Inglorious Basterds is a bit of a mixed bag. It demonstrates that Quentin Taratino hasn't completely lost it as a filmmaker, but it also indicates that we'll probably never get any more truly great work out of him.
Theoretically, this story is supposed to be based on a team of Jewish-American soldiers during World War II who were sent into occupied France to fight the Nazis. It's pretty clear that Tarantino lost interest in that idea at some point, so he throws in a remedial primer on the early 20th century German film industry, inserts an extraordinarily charismatic Nazi, adds in some of his "I love the 70s" stylistic flourishes and wraps it all up with a crude and oddly-timed Jewish revenge fantasy.
The first thing to know about this movie is that it's fairly talky, even by Tarantino standards. He's coming awfully close here to doing with dialog what Michael Bay does with explosions. Virtually every dialog scene goes on too long, to the point where it's obvious that Taratino's just dragging things out for his own amusement. I know a lot of people love Tarantino's dialog and the fact that much of it is in French or German helps to disguise how a decent portion of it is as aimless and meandering as what he did in Death Proof, but that doesn't change the fact that most of the conversation scenes in this movie would have greatly benefited from a little editing.
The second thing to know about Inglorious Basterds is that it has some spectacular performances. Christoph Waltz is brilliant as the complexly civilized Jew hunter, Colonel Hans Landa. He does some genuinely Oscar-worthy acting up until the end of the film, when the script rips the character away from him and makes Landa a servant of the Almighty Plot Hammer. Diane Kruger is also very good as a German movie star working for the British and Michael Fassbender is the epitome of English charm as a British soldier who used to be a film critic. Til Schweiger gives a small but compelling performance as a German Nazi-killer as well and Daniel Bruhl as a German war hero is surprisingly human, again right up until the scripts rips the character away from him.
Though he's the titular star of Inglorious Basterds, Brad Pitt does not do a good job as backwoods leader of the Jewish-American soldiers. He's like a stand up comedian on open mic night who tells the same joke over and over and over and over. Some folks might find that ironically funny and I don't think Tarantino wanted anything else from Pitt, but it's just not good. Mike Myers also embarrasses himself in a small role where he looks like he's playing a character from a fourth Austin Powers movie.
The third thing to know about this film is that Tarantino is again playing around with story structure. He's not doing the whole non-linear thing again, thank goodness, but it appears as though he only wrote individual scenes and then stretched them out as far as he could. He largely dispensed with the connective tissue of the story so he could focus on what he thinks is "the good stuff". The problem is those little moments in between the big moments are often where the story gets a lot of its depth and where the big moments get a lot of their power. By cutting away all those little moments, Tarantino leaves us with a story and characters that are far too shallow.
The final thing to know about Inglorious Basterds is that there's a tin-eared quality to its emotional resonance. This is a revenge fantasy about murdering Hitler and while there's never a bad time to killer Hitler, doing such a film might have made sense in 1950, 1960 or 1970. Making such a movie in 2009 is sort of fetishy. The story is built on a visceral hatred that Tarantino and his actors don't actually feel, because it's almost impossible to viscerally hate someone who died several decades before you were born. Someone who viscerally hates Hitler, like Mel Brooks for example, would have been driven by that hatred to make a film that was either much darker or much funnier. Inglorious Basterds always seems alienated from the very emotions at the core of its story.
If you thought Kill Bill and Death Proof were great, you'll think Inglorious Basterds is a masterpiece. It's much better than those two movies. But if you recognized the flaws in those films, you'll be able to see the problems in this one. There is a lot to enjoy here; the acting, the dialog before it tests your patience, a more restrained example of Tarantino's flair for cinematic violence. The problem is that there will probably always be something to enjoy in Taratino's work. But his last three movies (Kill Bill counts as one) all have obvious, significant weaknesses. With Inglorious Basterds, I'd say the good outweighs the bad, but the bad is still there. I don't know if no one will tell Tarantino when there's a problem with a film, if he won't listen or it he isn't willing to work hard enough to fix it.
Granted, Tarantino has already made more great movies than most filmmakers do in the entire careers, but it's frustrating to think he'll never make anything that good again.