Review of Inglourious Basterds (2009) by Jonathan B — 12 Jan 2016

I struggle with Quentin Tarantino films. I just don't get the majority of them and find the violence too graphic and too casual. He does make decent movies now and again but, for me, he is inconsistent and juvenile in his approach.

Inglourious Basterds (sic) really bought me up sharp. The opening scene is spectacularly good, everything you want from a movie dealing with WWII. It was almost unbearably tense and this is thanks largely to the acting skills of Christoph Waltz here playing a really nasty, sadistic Nazi.

Sadly, after this opening 10 minutes or so, the movie rapidly degenerates into pretty dreadful, comicbook action. The plot is great and this could have been a superb, nail-biter of a movie but in the hands of Tarantino we get unnecessarily gory scenes and aspects of character and situation that stretch credulity beyond breaking point.

Brad Pitt is terrible as Aldo Raine who must count as one of the most supremely unsuitable spies in the history of moviemaking. Quite how the audience is meant to believe that this oaf of a man could ever pass muster in occupied France is insulting.

There's also the grating annoyance of what has to be the worst and least convincing portrayal of Adolf Hitler that I can remember in a long time. The fact that Martin Wuttke Bears not the slightest resemblance to Hitler is a huge distraction to his scenes and, frankly, in this day and age, unforgivable.

Three actors stand out head and shoulders above the rest. The aforementioned Christoph Waltz is chilling and totally wasted in this film. He is joined in trying to salvage something of merit by the two female leads, Melanie Laurent and Diane Kruger both of whom deserve so much better.

I'm guessing that Tarantino was misguidedly trying to take the WWII genre and give it a kind of modern blackly comic gangster twist. All he actually manages to do is provide us with an inconsistently styled movie, with a jarringly inappropriate soundtrack that bounces between a taught thriller, an over the top shoot-em-up and Carry On Adolf.

I clearly don't understand where this guy is coming from or what he's attempting to say.