Childish yet boring

Rating: 2/10 (18 July 2009)

Infantile twaddle. Whatever happened to Quentin T? He never grew up, he grew down. Is he Benjamin Button? This silly project feels like someone gave a 10-year-old $75 million to make a movie. Only the German actor Waltz, as a smarmy, ostentatiously "charming" SS man, connects. Everyone else is either a kitschy stereotype or a cipher. And there's no fighting. Oh, there's plenty of killing, a good dose of torture, but never that staple of the war film, the "battle" in which a unit tries to take an objective. Instead, too many long long scenes of dialogue building to little spasms of -- not action in the classic movie sense but as I say--killing. Ugh, particularly an ending (SPOILER ALERT) that asks us to cheer as hundreds of men and women, most elderly, are burned to death. Memo to Brad Pitt: Your imitation of Warren Oates leaves much to be desired. Plot: the Basterds (a Dirty Dozen-like team of Jewish GIs working behind enemy lines) and a Jewish guerrilla fighter who just happens to own a movie theater and a beautiful German movie star who's actually a British agent all plot independently to blow up--again Dirty Dozen style--a movie premier to be attended by the German High Command, including Hitler and minions. None of the "basterds" is a character; instead they've been picked for a "Jewish" cast to their face. How repellant is that. The two chicks are more than degraded by the script, the plot is silly. I know it's not supposed to be "realistic," of course; but it aspires to a weird blend of hip, movie-savvy referentialism, naive '50s war comics with atttitude gore, and a buzz of irony as we sophisticates enjoy Quentin's send-up of prole lit. It's way beyond his meager talents, and as he's gotten older he seems to have gotten more arrogant and more contemptuous of his audience. Of course it's slapdash, impossible, overplayed and nauseatingly violent to no good purpose. A complete waste. And I love the people who call it "unique." Yeah, as in "uniquely stupid."