Canned cheese

Rating: 3/10 (27 September 2009)

Straight from the can. It combines the historical accuracy and realism of 300 with the premise of The Dirty Dozen. It's pulp fiction, true, but is it intentional kitsch. Having watched it, I thought it might have been but after I read an interview with Tarantino, I changed my mind.
It taps into that primeval want for doing bad things to people we don't like. Revenge, don't think so, well, maybe in case of the girl but she's not the audience, she's not even a basterd. Justice, not exactly that either, it's not a court in there and it's done from a contemporary and utterly simplified point of view. It does however provide a relief for that sense of powerlessness you might experience when confronted with "the heavy stuff", that is if you are ignorant enough to be able to talk yourself into it. And in the end, those cheers don't change anything or make you one of the "good guys".
I found the audiences reactions to be more amusing than the movie itself. Take the reactions people had to the scalping or "batting" scenes. On one hand the disgust and shock of some of the more sensitive of our brothers and sisters out there, just as highly emotional as the joy and bewilderment some of our domesticated animals have experienced. To be honest, the volume of graphic violence was rather small. Just a few rather short scenes in between all that talking and talking, French, German, Italian.
Getting to the one redeeming feature of the movie that I've managed to find, unintentional as it might have been, it made thousands of testosterone laden juveniles read subtitles. I find that hilarious.
How about this for a tag line: This is what the play from The Producers would have looked like had Germany won the war.
As a pulp violence showcase it's lackluster and as a serious war movie it's script is just ridiculous and mediocre, so except for the stylization and technical aspects, what's exactly supposed to be the movies appeal.