Disappointing: slow and skillless

Rating: 4/10 (30 August 2009)

Tarantino's latest, a WWII revenge tale, is also his most disappointing, somehow managing to be like a bowl of plain oatmeal: tough to stomach, lumpy in spots, and ultimately flavorless.
I confess to being a full-throated fan of Quentin Tarantino. (We both come from solid video-store-employee stock, you see.) I have enjoyed all of his films, including the ones he wrote but didn't direct. And I have to say that compared with his other works, Inglourious Basterds falls short of all of them.
The (fictional) story is about a group of Jewish Americans recruited by one Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) to hunt Nazi soldiers and, well, scalp them. Raine's Basterds are very good at their jobs (Raine's required 100 literal scalps from his crew), and their notoriety has spread. The team is assigned by the Americans to rendezvous with a German actress/double agent named Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), who has discovered that the location of the premiere of Joseph Goebbels' latest propaganda film has been moved from the vast Ritz theater to a smaller venue in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Unbeknownst to von Hammersmark and the Basterds, the young owner of the new venue, played by Melanie Laurent has her own plans for the premiere; she and her lover will set the theater on fire, killing all the high-ranking Nazis inside, including Goebbels and Hitler.
There are also two other smaller stories (all four dovetail in the end, of course). An SS officer, Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz), known as "the Jew Hunter," has a Jewish family murdered on a remote farm in France, where they are being hid. Naturally, the one person who escapes his wrath that day grows into the young theater owner. Also, a German sharpshooter, now a national hero, is the subject of Goebbels' new film and is himself trying to woo the young theater owner.
My first problem with the movie is the revenge factor itself. In order for me to root for a protagonist who's exacting revenge, I need to a) sympathize with their plight and b) believe that the punishment they're meting out is suitable. And although there's plenty of style to this film, I don't think that the Basterds met either of those criteria. In fact, it would be one thing if this were a straightforward (and straightfaced) revenge flick, like Death Wish, but Pitt and his fellow Basterds take far too much glee in torturing and dissecting Nazis than I'm comfortable with. Their mirth seems not only out of place, it seems kind of sick minded and unnecessary.
My second problem is just as insidious: the casting of Brad Pitt. I am a fan of Brad Pitt's work, as I am of Tarantino's. I think he can turn in good work when he wants to - that is, when he's not playing the sly, smarmy character he sometimes lapses into in movies like the Ocean's films. And that's what he does here. He's not just a superspy who's in charge of an elite commando unit, he's just a thuggish jerk who's really no better than the villains he's mowing down. On top of that, Pitt uses a ridiculous southern drawl that sounds exactly like someone trying to sound like a southern backwoods hillbilly mountain man: made-up, well over the top, and really grating to the ears. Killing natsies, indeed. I just think that a better actor, in this case, would have lent more gravitas to the role; Pitt's Raine feels like everything in the movie's supposed to be a big joke.
Overall, I was surprised to find few real twists or any memorable dialog (other than the laughable lines that Pitt overplays, seen in the trailers and previews anyway). Tarantino is known for slick, clever dialog, especially quick patter, and none of that was evident here. The twist - such as it is - is amply evident to everyone except the characters themselves.
At 153 minutes, Inglourious Basterds is as long as most other Tarantino songs, but without crisp dialog and tightly staged action scenes, it drags on. In some scenes (a standoff in an underground bar is well shot), this works, but overall there's just far too much down time.