Inglourious Basterds

Historical accuracy isn't something Hollywood does well. In fact it mainly doesn't bother with it at all. According to Braveheart the battle of Stirling Bridge took place in the middle of a big field, the clue to the true location is in the title. One of the biggest bugbears tends to be with American depictions of World War II. Too often the only accents on show are Yank or OTT Kraut. All of those other nationalities involved? You wouldn't know there were any. That isn't a problem in Tarantino's latest, indeed it's awash with Euro-talk, even in their own languages for much of the time. History isn't treated with quite as much regard. Inglourious Basterds' depiction of the Second World War isn't so much The Big Red One, more Operation Dumbo Drop, obviously with less elephant but much more scalping.

This is Tarantino's war movie but true to tradition it isn't actually a movie about war. This is a movie about other movies about war, a war film film if you will. Inglourious Basterds makes no grand statement on the folly of war, the pointlessness and senseless waste of human life, but then that's not the point. It has more to say about the use of something as tragic as World War II as the setting for rip-roaring entertainment. Not a great deal more since this is also a film that does that, but it's all, you know, tongue rammed in cheek clever, or something. Frankly it's a Tarantino film which means all the good and/or bad thing that usually means.

What it means is snappy dialogue and stylish violence and Inglourious Basterds is as full of those as Gordon Ramsay is as full of himself. The whole shebang opens with a twenty minute scene that mainly consists of the former as Col. Hans Landa, AKA The Jew Hunter, interrogates a French farmer. It's a fantastically tense scene and it introduces us to the real star of the film, sorry Mr. Pitt. Christoph Waltz's performance is really quite special, but the character he is playing is equally as brilliant. Landa is Tarantino's main achievement and showcases the director's writing at its absolute best. By the way that's not to say Brad Pitt isn't good, quite the opposite. He's clearly having a bawl as Lt. Aldo Raine, all Kentucky accent and bravura. He's also the comic focal point of the movie, something that Pitt showed he was capable of in Burn After Reading. The best comic moment comes as Raine and two of his men have to pose as Italians when they know maybe five phrases between them and none of them can do the accent. It's okay though as it turns out that Germans can't tell the difference between a Roman and someone speaking cod-Italian in a thick Kentuckian accent.

The thing is that those positives also act as problems. While the dialogue is great much of the time Inglourious Basterds suffers from too much of it. Huge swathes of the middle chapters feel like they should have been cut. As tense as the opening chapter is the trick isn't quite repeated later in two separate segments set in a restaurant and a bar respectively. Both chapters contain much to like but they feel overlong. It's as if Tarantino has fallen in love with the sound of his own voice when spoken by one of his characters. It was a major problem in his last film Death Proof, too much chatter, not enough stunt woman hanging off a car bonnet. Things are thankfully not as drastic here. Another problem is the humour. It is used sparingly and well, until the finale that is. It's an audacious, visually stunning scene, but there's also a sudden lurch into slapstick. One character even trips and falls whilst making his way past fellow cinema patrons. Upon reflection there is some advance warning during one of those overly talky scenes. When Nazi Fredrick Zoller attempts to woo Shosanna Dreyfus he goes on about French silent comedy and how it compares to Chaplin. Here was me thinking it was just ol' Quentin showing off his knowledge of early European cinema, kind of like that Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich stuff in Death Proof. We get it, you like cool music. Turns out it was actually very clever foreshadowing for the mass outbreak of stupidity at the end. Maybe.

This inconsistency is something that plagues the entire film. For everything that works in it there's something that doesn't. As great as the characters of Landa, Raine and Shosanna are pretty much all the rest are either one-note or have nothing to do. B.J. Novak's Utivich doesn't even speak until about fifteen minutes from the end. And as great as some of the casting is Mike Myers feels a little too in-jokey, Michael Fassbender isn't in it enough and there's Eli Roth. Roth is perhaps the luckiest man in Hollywood. If you though he was a disaster as a director wait until you see him act. Being chums with a hugely successful director clearly has its rewards though as here he plays a pivotal role, while infinitely more talented actors shuffle about in the background doing the square root of hee-haw. It's a woeful misjudgment by Tarantino.

It's these misjudgments that ultimately stop Basterds from being the rip-roaring killfest it should be. The pacing is all over the place separating the fun action stuff with long, dull scenes. Stylistically there are many nice little touches, look out for the subtitles and how they work in relation to which characters are on screen and how much they understand. Sadly Tarantino can't help doing, well, "Tarntino-y" stuff. Doodling things on screen, breaking a scene to give a character an introduction that looks like a screen from the Street Fighter character select, it's all a bit trying too hard really. The most alarming aspect of his last couple of films though comes in the shape of narrative. Death Proof didn't have one. Basterds attempts to readdress that by returning to the complex multi-narrative structures of his earlier films but he just doesn't pull it off. The strands fail to come together in a satisfying way, instead they simply collide thanks to setting of the finale. After the carefully intertwining plots of Pulp Fiction it feels somewhat slapdash.

Inglourious Basterds could have been something special. As it stands there's a great film in there, sadly to see it you need to also watch a boring, self indulgent, Eli Roth starring one. there's enough here to say it's worth seeing but how much you love it will likely depend on your pre-existing opinion of its director. All in all Inglourious Basterds is a bit of an inglorious mess.