Quentin Tarantino's latest is a maddening mix of comic book action, high camp, and gratuitous self indulgence. He's created a spectacle which kept me hooked from start to finish while also irritating the heck out of me with it's director's masturbatory obsession with cinematic pop culture.
But let's start with the comic book action. There's plenty of it (though not as much as the publicity and some reviews might suggest) and it's gory. Numerous bodies explode into a multitude of bright red chunks of flesh and spurting blood as they are machine gunned at close quarters. Throats are slit and the recently dead scalped in equally graphic and luridly technicolored detail. It's like watching a considerably more explicit version of one of the World War Two comic strips from my childhood brought to life.
For those who didn't share my youthful passion for comic book stories about an American sergeant under sentence of death from a bullet lodged milimetres from his heart fighting his way across France after D-Day, imagine one of those gung-ho starstudded 60s WW2 epics like "The Dirty Dozen", "Kelly's Heroes" or "Battle of the Bulge" with Telly Savalas chewing on a cigar and spitting contemptuously in the face of death.
Brad Pitt plays the Savalas part, as jut-jawed Lt Aldo Raine, grappling manfully with a backwoods Tennessee accent as he leads his band of Jewish-American "Inglorious basterds" on a bloody killing spree across Nazi occupied France.
The high camp is provided by SS Colonel Hans Landa, known as "the Jewhunter" for his tenacity and success in tracking down Jews who've gone into hiding. In the film's stand-out performance German actor Christoph Waltz plays Landa as cultured and totally ruthless, revelling in his reputation and his ornate uniforms, and delighting in turning every interrogation into a full-blown theatrical performance. It is to Landa that Tarantino assigns the bulk of his trademark longwinded monologues incorporating the kind of trivia, irrelevant digressions and self satisfied wordplay which start to really - really - irritate after a while.
Prevented by the period setting from loading the dialogue with his usual mishmash of pop culture references to music, and films and actors of the 1960s and 70s, Tarantino instead makes Landa's dialogue a loose amalgam of the smug, pontificating, self aggrandizing lines spoken by every actor ever to have played a German officer in a World War Two film.
Determined to show-off that he knows as much about cinema in the 20s and 30s as he does about the 60s and 70s he also gratuitously throws names like Brigitte Helm, Pola Negri and Emil Jannings into the mix. For me this kind of unnecessary (and to many cinemagoers, completely meaningless) namedropping says more about Tarantino's ego than an interest in creating period atmosphere.
From the totally implausible (even by the standards of the 60s movies he's pastiching) appearances by Hitler, Goring and Martin Bormann to everything else included in the film's sprawling 153 minute running time, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is exactly the kind of war film I'd expect Tarantino to make. It's not a masterpiece but it holds the attention and, after the tedious navel-gazing of 2007's "Deathproof," it's a welcome return to something approaching form.
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