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Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Time Out rating

Average user rating

67 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

You’ve got to admire the sheer, infectious force of Quentin Tarantino’s personality. Is there any other popular American director, who, like Tarantino, is constantly ranting and raving about cinema’s glorious past and giving young filmgoers reason to extend their DVD library back beyond ‘Star Wars’? Even the name of his new film is fondly stolen from a little known Italian movie of the 1970s. It’s only when you turn to Tarantino’s own films that things get more tricky. For the sad truth is that Tarantino, like cheap wine, just isn’t improving with age.

Which is an awkward reality because Tarantino obviously wants to put away childish things with this new film. Not only does Brad Pitt close the film with the self-regarding line ‘This may well be my masterpiece’, but ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is a little more restrained and a little more quiet than films like ‘Death Proof’ and ‘Kill Bill’.

I say ‘a little’ because much of the film is not quiet at all: when the music comes, it’s loud; when the deaths occur, they’re gruesome, even sadistic; and when the plot kicks in, it’s pure, wild fantasy.

The film moves liberally between French, German and English dialogue and takes us through five chapters. First, in 1941, we see a Nazi, Colonel Hans Landa (played by Austrian Christoph Waltz), known as ‘The Jew Hunter’, discover and kill a Jewish family in France; only the youngest daughter gets away.

Then we’re introduced to the ‘basterds’, a gang of eight Jewish-American soldiers who, while deep undercover, roam Nazi-occupied France, murdering German soldiers and collecting their scalps. They’re led by a Tennessee goodtime boy, played by Pitt, but oddly they’re not on screen much. Pitt is lively but he disappears for a long time and is upstaged by Waltz, who gives a teasing turn of sly comedy and cruel charm. His scenes are the film’s best.

For the film’s final chapters, we leap to Paris in 1944, where the two stories collide. The girl who fled the Nazis, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) is now running a cinema (of course) which plays films by Riefenstahl and Pabst. A Nazi private, Frederick (Daniel Brühl), takes a shine to her. It turns out that his gun-toting heroics are being immortalised in a film produced by Goebbels, who decides that Shosanna’s cinema is perfect for the premiere. Shosanna and the ‘basterds’ decide that the screening is their chance to strike.

This might be a period movie, but still we clock Tarantino’s signature style – the extended, know-it-all dialogue, the tricky gunplay, the pop-cultural nods. There’s even a Mexican stand-off à la ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and the obligatory ‘nigger’ reference, this time in French. But this lacks the stylistic pizzazz of Tarantino’s best, and by putting more emphasis than usual on the chatter it makes it more obvious that the talk often lacks wit and verve.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tarantino takes the history of cinema more seriously than the history of Europe. References to films abound: Michael Fassbender’s British spy (who has an amusing, if silly, ‘Dr Strangelove’-like scene with a superior played by Mike Myers) used to be a critic and regurgitates what sounds like a Wikipedia entry on German film, while another character wonders whether he prefers Chaplin or the French silent actor Max Linder.

What’s not clear is what Tarantino wants to achieve: ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is an immature work that doesn’t know whether it’s a pastiche, a spoof, a counterfactual drama, a revenge tragedy or a character comedy. How can we, within a space of minutes, feel adult sympathy for a hunted Jewish family and then childish glee when a Nazi’s skull is crushed with a baseball bat? The one cancels out the other.

But perhaps the biggest faux pas is introducing real historical characters. Tarantino’s inventions are big enough – not least Waltz’s terrific ‘movie’ Nazi – so why does he have to court implausibility by dragging in a loony Hitler (Martin Wuttke, nothing special) and introducing Goebbels? You might imagine, too, that this film was written in the ’60s: Tarantino seems blithely uninterested in more than 60 years of slow reconciliation between Europe and its past.

‘Subtle’ is not a word in Tarantino's lexicon. At the film’s heart is a fatal attempt to conflate fact with fiction and a celebration of vengeance that’s misplaced and embarrassing. Loyal fans expecting a familiar patchwork of Tarantino tics and quirks – ‘Pulp History’ or ‘Kill Hitler’ – might not be disappointed. Those expecting anything approaching progress, cinematically or ideologically, probably will be.

Author: Dave Calhoun 2009-08-18 13:07:20

Time Out London issue 2035, 20-26 August 2009

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User reviews of this film

margaret Wendy said...

Posted on Aug 27 2009 11:57 Enjoyed the film and it wasnt as gory as I thought it would be. We thought Brad Pitt was a joke.!!!

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flix said...

Posted on Aug 27 2009 00:05 Complete with an SS officer you'll love to hate, Col. Landa comically played OTT by Christoph Waltz and the perfect Diane Kruger as the oh so tasty Bridget von Hammersmark both steal the available limelight from former eye candy Brad who's barely clicking in this movie that's packing bums on seats despite lame critical reviews spouting inane drivel (sit down Usman) - thanks again QT for entertaining us all.

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matty said...

Posted on Aug 26 2009 14:47 pure crap! Fell asleep, way too much dialog

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Adam said...

Posted on Aug 25 2009 16:39 This review is way off the mark. I find it greatly lacks professional and independent opinion. While i can see the plot and style splits opinion, there is no hiding from the fact that this is a great piece of cinema. Time-Out have it way wrong here and the reviewer has very obvious childish issues. You may not like this film due to taste in cinema, but you will disagree with this moron. I loved it, but i can see why others might not. My grandmother certainly wouldn't have appreciated Pulp Fiction.

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Gort said...

Posted on Aug 25 2009 15:45 Boring movie. It was a little more then few guys playing war in front of the camera. I just wonder how many people would of watched this movie if it didn't have "Made by Tarantino" label on it. But you know it's not an ordinary movie it's Tarantino's movie and there is this hype about it. When it's Tarantino movie we applaud on every real name or fact they say in this move for instance "Goebbels" like we would applaud retard for remembering some facts, because this is Tarantino the no school kid from video store that made it.
And the ending we finally find out what Tarantino wanted to say: That he lives in his own world - which we already knew.

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Mark said...

Posted on Aug 25 2009 00:55 I loved it, it had a great script, great moments of suspense and some beautifully cinematic moments, not to mention the laughs. Shame on you Time Out editor's for not putting a warning about the spoilers, and as for Dave C: If you can't write a review without spoiling it for everyone else, just don't bother (or get your ego off the page and try a little harder!)

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MCDUFF said...

Posted on Aug 24 2009 12:37 I am seeing this today. I will ignore Usman. This is the person who thought Donkey Punch was a good film.

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MCDUFF said...

Posted on Aug 24 2009 12:37 I am seeing this today. I will ignore Usman. This is the person who thought Donkey Punch was a good film.

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Norman Lowther said...

Posted on Aug 24 2009 10:37 A nice family film !

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NoHope said...

Posted on Aug 24 2009 09:54 Amazing Dialogue

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d said...

Posted on Aug 24 2009 09:53 Please ensure the comment does not include the default comment text

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Lion said...

Posted on Aug 24 2009 01:55 This film does not work in any shape or form. There's no psychological depth, philosophical insight, emotional truth or ethical message. And even as a piece for a cinephile, his references to European cinema were largely lost. Of course, it's not trying to be historically accurate but as a spoof it failed miserably, too - laughs were few and far between. Tarantino is talented, no doubt. But this sujet just does not lend itself to his treatment. Period.

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Sebcfc said...

Posted on Aug 24 2009 00:21 This film is great. Tarantino is back. The first chapter of this film, is the best scene I have seen in cinema for years.

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rose said...

Posted on Aug 23 2009 19:05 usman its just a film you belter why write an essay on it

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simon kane said...

Posted on Aug 23 2009 18:22 You've totally dropped the ball on this one, Dave Calhoun. This is an extraordinary film far smarter than its detractors depicting the nightmare of life in an occpupied country (timely), and like Munich it uses the structure of a revenge caper to highlight the tragedy of conflict. I have put that very badly, but your initial assumption that the director doesn't know what he's doing rather than that you're just being incredibly lazy, has wound me up so much I just don't care. But really these assumptions, for example that we're meant to feel "childish glee" at the sight of a man having his head beaten in by a baseball bat, are pretty baseless (the victim's point of view here is surely our own as we hear Eli Roth making his way towards us unseen through the tunnel. We've been presented with one monster in Landa, now we have another in Brad Pitt, the decidedly gentile leader of the Basterds). It actually makes me angry to read a review as sloppy as this so I'll pack it in. Oh and for the record, since this is supposed to be your field, cinema's first great comedian Max Linder was French not German. Sorry to have bored you with a fact - gosh I must have sounded like Wikipedia.

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