Tarantino's War Movie

Rating: 9/10 (4 March 2017)

This wartime movie follows two separate stories that are destined to meet in the final scenes. In the first Col. Hans 'The Jew Hunter' Landa enters a French farm house and, after talking to the farmer for some time, shoots the Jewish family he was hiding; one of them, eighteen year old Shosanna, manages to escape. When we next see her it is 1944 and she is running a cinema in Paris. Here she catches the eye of a young German soldier; she isn't interested in him but it turns out he is famous amongst the Germans thanks to his exploits as a sniper. A film has been made about him and he wants the premiere to take place in her cinema with all the top brass in attendance she sees this as an opportunity to avenge her family's murder. Meanwhile the second story follows a small group of Jewish American soldiers, nicknamed the 'Inglourious Basterds', who are working deep inside enemy territory killing any Germans they can get their hands on. When British Military Intelligence learns of the film premiere this group are brought into a plot to blow up the cinema with the help of a German actress, Bridget von Hammersmark, who has been working as a double agent. As the big night approaches it emerges that Adolf Hitler himself will be in attendance along with other senior Nazis if everything goes to plan the war could end in 1944.
If you like your war stories to fit in with real history you might find this rather annoying as some real people who did not die in 1944 end up dead in this film if however you are looking for a cracking war film with a good amount of action, some very tense scenes and a spectacular finale you could do a lot worse than this. The film opens more like a spaghetti western than a war film with the Germans arriving at a remote farmhouse. Here Landa and the farmer just talk for the first twenty minutes of the film the tension gradually rising as we wait for something to happen. Christoph Waltz is delightfully menacing without ever issuing a direct threat or raising his voice; in this scene and for most of the movie. After this prologue things get more interesting as we switch between the two plots to kill Nazis at the cinema; at any time either could be exposed or they could somehow ruin the other's scheme. Given that Tarantino's previous films are pretty bloody I expected this to be very violent but it isn't excessively; there are indeed moments of violence but more often there is just the feeling that something violent is about to happen; when it does it is short and bloody. The cast do a fine job; as well as the aforementioned Christoph Waltz there are great performances from Brad Pitt as the leader of the titular 'Inglourious Basterds', Mélanie Laurent as Shosanna and Diane Kruger as Bridget von Hammersmark. Overall I'd certainly recommend this to fans of Tarantino's earlier films as well as people looking for a thrilling war movie.