Review of Inglourious Basterds (2009) by Hugh R — 07 Mar 2015

Lately I have been trying to more coherently form my thoughts on why I didn't care for "Inglorious Basterds". Now that I think about it some more, it was a matter of inconsistency of tone and pointless violence.

With "Inglorious Basterds", Tarentino didn't seem to know exactly what kind of movie he was making and he switched back and forth between styles with no rhyme or reason. I know people say that's his "style", but he has proven he can work within his "style" and still make a movie that works within its own universe if nowhere else. Here he jumped so randomly between Parisian/subtitled art house movie to exploitation flick to war drama with such quickness that the story lost all sense of flow and I was constantly being knocked out of the movie like a car crash. I have seen these three styles worked together before and to do it well you have to flow one into the other as a consequence of the story and not a jump cut that seem to exist only as a result of the director's inability to blend them together.

As far as the violence goes I really don't mind gory, even gratuitous violence, as long as it serves the story and doesn't merely exist as a gag. For instance the difference between the Hitler skull destruction scene near the end when compared to a similar death in "Glory". In "Glory" a commander's head popped like a ripe zit during a close up and splattered everyone around him in dripping bits of brain matter and hair. Over, done, quick and pointed. It made its impact and moved on. In "Inglorious Basterds" the violence is such a distinct entity in the exploitation sections of the movie that it felt like Tarentino was sitting around with some buddies saying, "hey you know what'd be so super gross?!" and then he built a movie around it. It never felt like it served a plot or a direction for the story. Even "Hobo With A Shotgun" seemed to have a reason for most of the gratuitous violence it showed and there was a consistent tone to the film. That movie was messed up beyond all reason, but the film makers kept us firmly rooted in a world that made sense, at least to itself and it obeyed its own rules.

If this had been a clips movie of short films and it were edited into distinct sections where one third was the straight narrative of the girl, one third was gory exploitation, and one third was the ending where they come together, all presented one right after the other instead of interspersed within one another I might have found a middle ground with the movie. As it was I just didn't enjoy it. Editing it differently may have provided us with a far better movie.