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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

usman khawaja said...

Posted on Aug 23 2009 15:16 it is sad to see jewish victims being exploited to breed evil immoral and satanic messages -
guised in a conflict which is supposed to be between right and wrong but actually this becomes an accursed attempt to taint the good side and induce a conflict iwithn the hearts of the humanists -like start a war amongst the pure by concluding good cannot win unless it becomes evil itself -
that is the vision here -
and the screeplay is riddled with huge flaws from the first to last frame both technically and in writing -
kill bill and pulp fiction cannot be compared to this vulgar porn which is ugly to all senses too -even the music was sickening -
an atrocity to humanity -
the german english french and italian languages were never used in a more foul attempt to rubbish human spirit

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Roops said...

Posted on Aug 23 2009 10:01 It is a Tarantino film: violent, stylish, silly, witty, "clever" -- and a really, really fun experience.
No, it doesn't make sense (did Pulp Fiction?) but so what?
I'm glad I went & recommend to others: exciting, stylish and a lot to talk about over a drink afterwards (and I needed a drink!)

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Tom Hanks said...

Posted on Aug 22 2009 11:54 I did not quite understand why the Palestinians (the basterds) took such pleasure in killing the Jewish settlers (Nazis). This porn failed to turn me on.

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usman khawaja said...

Posted on Aug 22 2009 03:35 dear dave ,
this is pure immoral chaotic frenzy with no conscience with not a glimmer of hope ,where every character is a cheap ,stinking ,deceptive venomous blast from hell,
there is no spirit here or light as it is a satanic ritual by demonic dark and dastardly batards .
it has no proportion or shame and any logic or any ability to debate war,persecution or honour or human spirit -which is left festering at the self-indulgent ego mania of TARANTINO and ptt's arrogance in assuming they are making an actual movie but it is really a caricature of cinema which you have very charitably rated at 2 stars -
this is not even worthy of anything but woebegone accursed lamentation from a sickened audience who like me felt like throwing up when they were not totally bored by the absolutely poor craftmanship and the stupendously ludicrous dialogue from three european states -
a movie that insults humanity and is a serious outrage to logic and factual history .
if the jews were indeed the atrocious characters they have been portrayed here than my sympathy lies with the nazis and third reich .
lastly the movie is stolen from YOUNG LIONS -then the kino gutting is borrowed from a bolly thriller -SATYA ,AND LASTLY -BRAD PITT with his wrinkles and bloated face has mimicked MARLON BRANDO from a famous western which you know very well -but he is such a pernurious and unfortunate non-talent that he cannot even come close in proximity to xeroxing the great brando -
an abysmal ,immoral travesty of human race and excremental cinema at it's worst .
indeed the name applies to the whole team and is an apt title to describe anyone associated with this infantile sadomasochistic disjointed interlude ascribed in the name of cinema .

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Tom H said...

Posted on Aug 22 2009 00:41 gud movie, just be prepared for a lonngggg drone of dialogue throughout the middle. other than that, its a decent, comic stip style movie. worth seeing!

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fifi said...

Posted on Aug 21 2009 20:03 Nah, Salient I was flown to the States for a private viewing six months ago beat that.

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js1000 said...

Posted on Aug 21 2009 07:13 blah blah blah, what is it with these reviewers that always try to surgically dissect movies and then produce boring and irrelevant comments. I thought it was a great, entertaining movie with a cool script and well acted and some brilliant set pieces. Two and half hours flew by for me..........don't miss it

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dumdumboy said...

Posted on Aug 20 2009 21:21 Whoops! Few typos in my previous diatribe! Forgot to mention the absurd 'comic-book' on-screen graphics too! RIDICULOUS! Too arbitary, pointless and juvenile. QT spent time re-writing/adding to other scripts... think it's time someone re-wrote his! Over and out....

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dumdumboy said...

Posted on Aug 20 2009 21:16 At last a review that tells it like it is! Let's make this clear: Tarantino stopped being relevant after Pulp Fiction. IB is lazy, dull filmaking. At some point Qt needs to rely on his own creativity rather tha simply lifting titles and scores from other films. There is NOTHING creative about putting Bowie's (and Moroder's) Cat People theme onto a VERY dull track in onto our 'heroine'. For a moment he almost fooled me, but ANYONE can put an iconic track onto underwhelming filmaking in the vague hope it may levitate to a higher plane. A TRUE cinematic artist creates his OWN moments. The opening lazy dull sequence at the farm house offered nothing new on sideways build up to inevitable conclusion that hasn't been done a miilion times before! QT himself has often quoted the two laws of filmaking: don't talk when you can show AND get into a scene as late as you can and get out as early as you can. This is CINEMA if you think you can write great dialogue (note: think, he can't anymore) then put it in a novel. QT has femained alarmingly UN-cinematic since R.Dogs (and maybe P.Fiction) do yourself a favour AVOID!

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Paul L said...

Posted on Aug 20 2009 17:46 Fantastic piece of entertainment. I loved every minute of it. While it was certainly very over-the-top, Tarantino showed some structural discipline not present in the overlong revenge films of KILL BILL. And the dialogue and story were so much more involving than the awful DEATHPROOF.

BASTERDS contains so many memorable scenes, action, performances and characters to mention. The ending brought all the narrative strands together to a fantastically bloody, operatic and DePalmaesque (CARRIE/SCARFACE) conclusion.
It would be good if Tarantino could transfer/develop the suspense and nuance of the opening chapter into a whole movie next time and perhaps calm down on the movie references; but overall I was blown away by this rollicking, rollercoaster comic-book style movie. Definitely Tarantino's best film since JACKIE BROWN.

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JasCarlisle said...

Posted on Aug 20 2009 16:12 Jew's killing Nazis!
Just F***ing brilliant!
Got to love Quentin Tarantino's style, lol's
I loved the movie, but it's maybe not one to take your las to.
Most guys though, will be left wanting more!

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theBearNazi said...

Posted on Aug 20 2009 14:11 I liked the film so much, on the way home from the cinema my buddies and I went to scalp nazis. We couldn't find any, so I scalped myself and my buddies scalped each other.
Also I think Brad Pitt's performance was great. It was a very powerful speech when he said. "First rule of fight club, don't talk about fight club..." It sent tingles down my anus.
If you get an audience laughing at jews scalping nazis, the film must have done it's job. Bye.

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Robster said...

Posted on Aug 20 2009 07:12 I 100% agree with the review. I am sorry but it’s just not a great movie at all, which is a shame because Tarantino’s first two films were everything that this film is not and it’s always more painful when the brilliant no longer shine as brightly as they once did.

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chis.r.brown said...

Posted on Aug 20 2009 01:33 This review is uncharacteristically messy for Time Out, and for the usually excellent Dave Calhoun. Given that the plot concerns an elite unit of Jews (including ‘The Bear Jew’) who dispatch Germans via scalping and baseball-batting, to claim that the introduction of Hitler and Goebbels ‘courts implausibility’ seems to miss the point. For Inglourious Basterds doesn’t, as Calhoun suggests, ‘conflate fact with fiction,’ but instead trades exclusively on fictional representations of WWII and the Nazis (Hitler included) which Tarantino rightly assumes are chiefly familiar to us from the 60s/70s war-adventure canon. Suggesting that the director is uninterested in the history of European reconciliation is irrelevant because, crucially, he understands that it is cinema itself -those Sunday afternoon flicks with John Mills and Gregory Peck- which has been so vital in shaping audiences’ perception of this history. And it is to that cinema (and others) that Tarantino turns his attention.
Perhaps inevitably this is going to result in parody and, at some points, high camp. In particular, the Riefenstahl music-video homage set to David Bowie reveals a director who understands the debt of post-war culture to fascist aesthetics (indeed Basterds sometimes recalls the approach of Paul Verhoeven). As such, the action-revenge storyline is no more embarrassing (and certainly less compromised) than the innumerable worthy, patronizing depictions of Jews in WWII that Hollywood has overwhelmingly tended to employ.

If Tarantino’s approach is not to Calhoun’s taste, then fine- but the director should be taken to task on his own (decidedly non-literal) terms, instead of critics taking refuge in ludicrously bombastic waffle about ‘cinematic and ideological progress.’

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Salient said...

Posted on Aug 19 2009 13:31 I was fortunate enough to be invited to an early screening of the film a month before release and to be quite honest I loved the movie. Yes it's very much a merging of thematic styles, hence your spaghetti western meets old boys war movie. Clearly not a style that Dave Calhoun finds to his liking. But when all's said and done, it's a terrific romp. I found the opening sequence a tense an opening to a movie I've experienced in some time( Thanks Dave Calhoun for telling us exactly what happens in your review!)
In fact I found Time Out's review to be below the usual standards I would expect from them. It was a cynical and sarcastic review that ruined some, if not all the twists and turns of the movie. He has the right to slag it off, no doubt but giving away the plot...methinks someone has a bee in their bonnet for Quentin Tarantino.
Take my advice, see this movie!!

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