Inglorious Basterds

CAST: Brad Pitt
              Christoph Waltz
              Melanie Laurent
              Diane Kruger
              Michael Fassbender
              Daniel Bruhl
              Til Schweiger
              Jacky Ido
              Eli Roth
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED: Quentin Tarantino
**1/2 TWO AND A HALF STARS

The dirty little secret about writer and directorQuentin Tarantino is that he doesn’t have a single original element is any of his films. All of his films starting with his first movie Reservoir Dogs (which was an unacknowledged unofficial remake of the 1987 Hong Kong thriller City on Fire) are entirely made up of scenes, ideas, themes and storylines from other films from the 1940’s to the present but twisted and distorted in his own unique way. His movies are virtual film encyclopedias of movies of every genre, domestic and foreign, that he’s loved his entire life. Every movie he’s made is basically a hard core film geek’s paradise.

With his new World War II action epic, Inglorious Basterds (with its intentional misspelling) Tarantino stays hard fast and true to his method. No doubt destined to polarize filmgoers, Basterds takes its title from the 1978 Italian cheapo cult favorite Inglorious Bastards starring the great Fred (The Hammer) Williamson and the film evokes the popular 1960’s “men on a suicide mission’ films such as the terrific The Guns of Navarone, the underrated Play Dirty, the magnificent and awesome Where Eagles Dare and especially The Dirty Dozen (which itself was a rip off of the film The Secret Invasion made a few years earlier).

However, along with an eclectic music soundtrack from cuts ranging from Italian “spaghetti” western to David Bowie, Tarantino turns the whole WW II film genre on its ear while literally rewriting actual history at the same time.

Nothing in Basterds happens the way it’s supposed to happen in films like this. Old, tried and true war movie clichés are thrown overboard and familiar and expected plot patterns are wrecked and crushed which will  no doubt disappoint some watchers for sure. But Tarantino’s ‘smash up” of different genres and styles, despite the film’s obvious flaws and Tarantino’s overindulgence, makes Basterds oddly compelling and at times undeniably exciting. A perverse and perverted take on films and what we expect from them.

Set in France during WWII, Brad Pitt in what is essentially a supporting role, plays U.S. Army commando Lt. Aldo Raine (a clever pun on 50’s movie tough guy actor Aldo Ray) who leads a group of Jewish American soldiers who’s single mission is to roam the countryside killing and scalping as many Nazi soldiers as they can.

At the same time, a young Jewish woman, Shosanna (Laurent), who’s the only survivor of her family’s execution by order of the evil Nazi Colonel Landa plots her revenge. Eventually both these separate strands of plot come together in the film’s fiery inferno of a climax in which some of our heroes and villains make it out alive while others don’t.

Basterds is somewhat hurt, as with all of Tarantino’s work. by his uncontrolled infatuation with his own material. The words economy or “getting to the point” are totally unknown to him. In his mind, why have a 5 -minute dialogue sequence when a 25 minute one will do?

Several of those kinds of scenes throw off the entire narrative structure and forward momentum of the film.

It’s Tarantino looking in the mirror and admiring himself and his cleverness and talent when moderation would have been much more effective.

With Pitt, who is broadly comic as the good ol’ Tennessee boy Raine, the performances are quite good except for Eli Roth, the director of the Hostel  horror films, now turned actor. Yet the real presence and star of the film is Christoph Waltz as Col. Landa, sure to be remembered as one of most memorable screen villains in recent films. Waltz is brilliant and totally commands the screen as a sophisticated, cultured yet also quietly terrifying, smiling cobra psychopath who is always one step ahead of his adversaries.

Inglorious Basterds is mind blowing, intense, funny, at times exciting yet also frustrating as well.

Still it is totally provocative, daring and a real game changer that’s not for all tastes but watchable all the same.