Inglourious Basterds (2009)
"This might just be my masterpiece" are the words, spoken by Brad Pitt, that Inglourious Basterds ends on, widely taken to be Tarantino's own assessment of the movie they conclude. Which is one I honestly can't find myself to agree with because among Tarantino's filmography I genuinely think he's made better movies both before and after Basterds.
Inglourious Basterds deals with two simultaneous plots against the National Socialist leadership in occupied France. A particularly fearsome elite unit of American soldiers with mostly jewish backgrounds are planning to carry out an explosive attack at the premiere of a propaganda movie with the entire NSDAP brass in presence while the owner of the movie theater, played by Melanie Laurent, herself a jewish fugitive, has her own plan for the premiere.
Who do I not like Basterds as much as Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill or Django? I think what it boils down to is that I feel the pacing's kinda off. I heard that it was originally intended to be a television series which explains some of it. It just feels like there's too much going on and most of it is not fleshed out enough. For a movie called Inglourious Basterds, the eponymous military unit feels like the least developed part of the film. Brad Pitt has a silly accent and likes to carve Swastika 's into enemies he leaves alive, Eli Roth bashes peoples head in with a baseball bat and Til Schweiger is German and that's about as much developlent most of them get. Then you get characters like Michael Fassbender as british lieutenant Hicox who gets a cool introduction scene, featuring Churchill, and then dies pretty much in the next sequence we see him in.
I dunno, everything that's not the plotline about jewish survivor Shoshanna, played by Melanie Laurent and her plot to avenge the massacre of her family just feels pretty under baked. She is one of the two actually well developed characters in the movie, the other one of course being Christoph Waltz as the antagonist, Colonel Hans Landa of the SS. And where I consider Basterds one of Tarantino's weaker movies I will say that Landa is one of his best characters. He's effectively what you get if you cross Columbo with a Bond villain, smarter than everyone else, wittier than everyone else and playing it all off with smirking glee and an air of folksy germanic charm that almost makes you want to root for him.
Most of the rest just feels like Tarantino going through the motions. Long winded conversations that escalate into violence. Pop culture references of varying obscurity. The occasional shootout. The occasional good joke or quirky stylistic flourish. I dunno, people like this movie a lot but to me it felt all a bit underwhelming.
The thing is, I think the premise is great. Seeing the end of World War 2 through Tarantino's lense of genre pastiche, famously ending with the entire NSDAP brass being assassinated in a movie theater, should be a lot of fun. But it never quite gets there because a lot of it just feels truncated. What this should have been is a sprawling romp through occupied France where every character gets the limelight they deserve but as is, it feels a bit like a Readers Digest version of itself that covers all the major beats but leaves a lot on the floor. Matter of fact, it's about what I feel that hypothetical 2 hour version of Kill Bill that I wrote about it in my review for that movie would have been like.
It's not that the movie has nothing going for it, there's just not enough of the good in there and too much of the sort of thing that, certainly, Tarantino has down to a science but also feels like he's playing the hits. And... I dunno, yes, it's fun for me as a German to see a reference to Winnetou in an American movies, that little bit about King Kong was a wonderful little bit of writing, Christoph Waltz was absolute gold in every scene and I imagine his character can look forward to a long and successful career in the CIA doing more or less the same things for the Americans that he did for the Germans.
It's just... it never quite adds up. It's not Tarantino's funniest movie, it's not his best action movie, it's not his smartest or most ambitious movie it's just... fine with a couple of standout scenes. I don't have anything against it, I get why people like it. But his masterpiece, it isn't.
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