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Web Exclusive Review: Inglourious Basterds

Alternative Press - Rachel Lux on 8/19/09 @ 10:28 AM - altpress.com

DRAMA
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (The Weinstein Co.)
STARS > Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Mélanie Laurent, B.J. Novak, Daniel Brühl, Michael Fassbender
DIRECTOR > Quentin Tarantino
RATING > [4/5]
OPENS > AUG 21

There's something incredibly sadistic about showing a cinema full of people a scene in which a cinema full of people burn to death, but that's exactly the mood Quentin Tarantino is shooting for with the cryptically misspelled Inglourious Basterds. His climactic cinema blaze is merely the tip of Tarantino's latest ultra-violent iceberg. Set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, Basterds is a two-hour cavalcade of machine-gunnings, scalpings, baseball-bat bludgeonings and forehead-swastika-carvings--most of it in the blood-soaked wake of a group of Jewish-American soldiers led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt). When Raine and his revenge squad catch wind that the Nazi high command--Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and Himmler--will be present at the screening of a film about a German war hero (Brühl), they embark upon an assassination plot that converges with that of a young Jewish girl (Laurent) whose family was murdered by a Nazi hit squad led by Col. Hans Landa (Waltz), aka "The Jew Hunter."

Like all of Tarantino's films, Basterds cross-references a bevy of B-movies that came before it--in this case, a few of the lesser-known Spaghetti Westerns and "macaroni combat" exploitation films of the 1960s and, titularly speaking, an Italian WWII film from 1978 titled The Inglorious Bastards. As usual, he transcends his influences by way of snappy dialogue, unforgettably violent scenes and fantastic characters--particularly Pitt's puffy-faced Tennessee hick and Waltz's blithely vicious, multilingual SS officer (for which the 52-year-old Austrian won Best Actor at Cannes earlier this year). Cabin Fever/Hostel director Eli Roth is also spectacular as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, the Boston-bred, baseball bat-wielding "Bear Jew" who brains Nazis with his trusty Louisville Slugger. Then there are the lesser Basterds, played by B.J. Novak (The Office), Omar Doom (Death Proof) and German actor Til Schweiger, to name a few. Meanwhile, Diane Kruger (Wicker Park) appears as brassy double agent Bridget von Hammersmark; German actor August Diehl plays a Gestapo officer who meets a horrific end; Mike Myers cameos as an English military strategist, and Samuel L. Jackson provides sporadic narration.

Considering the vast international cast of characters (apparently, Basterds has more speaking roles than any other Tarantino project) and the fact that at least half of the film's 152 minutes require subtitles for the French, German or Italian being spoken by the actors onscreen, it's all the more impressive that Tarantino manages to keep Basterds from getting lost in translation. Some of the scenes border on the overly long--especially a basement bar sequence that culminates in a sudden Reservoir Dogs-style shootout--but never take the plunge into tedium. Instead, Tarantino expertly ratchets the suspense skyward, finessing the dialogue toward a merciless physical zenith. But as with Pulp Fiction, Death Proof and the Kill Bill flicks, Tarantino offsets his brutal tendencies with more than a few comic turns before combining the two sensibilities in what might be his most poetic ending to date. Rumors abound about a possible Basterds prequel, and though the idea is probably in the pure publicity-stunt phase of the Weinstein Company's pre-release hype cycle, we're backing it fully. Long live the Nazi scalpers, we say. Long live the Basterds. --J. Bennett

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LuckyFin31 Posted 08.22.09 at 10:51PM
So looking forward to this. Have heard nothing but positive things from reviews thus far.



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