Give 'em guns and Bowie knives, drop 'em behind enemy lines, and send the Inglourious Basterds into action.
What is not to like about dispatching armed and angry Jews to kill Nazis during the Second World War?
Especially in a Quentin Tarantino film.
It means there will be blood. And violence. In extreme close-ups.
There are shootings and beatings and scalpings. Swastikas are carved into forehead flesh. A German soldier's head is bashed in with a baseball bat, a home run that is dedicated to Ted Williams.
Feeling squeamish?
Too bad, then don't go.
Meanwhile, if you forget why Nazis are monsters, Tarantino launches the narrative with a brutal but realistic Holocaust scene of Germans butchering a family of Jewish dairy farmers.
The story's mesmerizing villain -- an S.S. officer played with oily charm and creepy, poetic intelligence by German actor Christoph Waltz -- is introduced right at the beginning and controls the arc of the entire film. That means Brad Pitt plays a secondary if memorable role, as do other key actors from Eli Roth to Diane Kruger, Julie Dreyfus, Til Schweiger, Michael Fassbender, Daniel Bruhl, an amusing Mike Myers as a British general, plus Sylvester Groth as a slimeball Goebbels and Martin Wuttke as a spittle-spewing psycho-Hitler.
Despite the violence -- in part because of it -- Inglourious Basterds is a brilliant example of shock cinema. But it owes more to the stylized traditions of spaghetti westerns than it does to classic American war movies. It is also a Jewish revenge fantasy -- with emphasis on the fantasy.
While extreme in its grit and gore, Inglourious Basterds is often surprisingly funny, like Pulp Fiction was between the murders. With its deliberately misspelled title as an indicator of the off-kilter story to come, Basterds tells the politically incorrect and historically inaccurate story of a platoon of Jewish-American soldiers dropped into occupied France in 1942 to wreak havoc on the Germans. The goal is a reign of sheer terror. Tarantino does not differentiate between regular German soldiers and the S.S. goons. The Basterds kill all they meet, except one who can then tell the tale.
A set of parallel stories leads the Basterds toward the film's fiery climax.
One story chronicles the activities of Waltz's Colonel Landa, who is proud of his nickname The Jew Hunter. He plays with words with aplomb, making his character even more romantic and dangerous. And Waltz handles the complex Tarantino dialogue with ease in English, French, German and even Italian (in this film, people talk in whatever language is appropriate to the situation, and we get English subtitles on the French and German).
Another storyline shows what happens to a young Jewish woman (the fetching Melanie Laurent) who escaped one of Landa's atrocities. She is now running a theatre in Paris, offering both sex appeal and respect for cinema.
Her theatre, and Laurent, attract the attention of a cocky German war hero (Bruhl) who is also the star of a German war film depicting his exploits as a sniper. Roth, who plays the baseball-wielding Basterd, also directed Bruhl's black-and-white, neo-classic, film-within-the-film.
Tarantino, being a cinephile, finally concocts a fantastic plot device to bring the loose ends of the plot together. It involves film, as a medium for conveying propaganda and as a volatile physical entity.
In addition, the emotional twists that bring Inglourious Basterds to its bittersweet end are pure cinema.
Don't look for reality.
Tarantino makes outrageous and glorious movies, not documentaries.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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