Blu-ray Review: Inglourious Basterds

The Film

Just when you thought Quentin Tarantino’s hipper-than-thou brand of eccentric and ultra-violent moviemaking had overstayed its welcome by a couple of films, he goes and makes Inglourious Basterds, his most mature and least idiosyncratic film yet — and it manages to be that while simultaneously rewriting World War II history in a blaze of fantasy revenge.

Basterds distills all that’s great about Tarantino — his vast love and knowledge of cinema and his obvious talent for creating memorable scenes — and is absent of some of his less desirable qualities — namely, that insufferable snarkiness — to create an undeniably absorbing and entertaining piece of work.

While the worship of Tarantino by the legions of fanboy film bloggers and new media is absurd (Total Film named him the 12th best director ever in 2007, ahead of guys like John Ford, Robert Altman, Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel and Yasujiro Ozu), the guy knows his way around both a camera and a script, and it shows.

The titular Basterds occupy just one storyline of the film, and it’s easily the least compelling. Brad Pitt gets top billing as a redneck commander of a squad whose only goal is to kill Nazis and take as many scalps along the way as possible, but it’s Michael Fassbender as Lt. Archie Hicox and Eli Roth as a fearsome baseball bat-wielding slaughterer known as the Bear Jew who make the biggest impression.

The true star of the film though is Christoph Waltz, who is endlessly magnetic as the coolly ruthless Nazi Col. Hans Landa. Nicknamed the Jew Hunter, Landa does his job efficiently and as charismatically as an ethnic cleanser can be. Waltz will assuredly be Oscar-nominated and has to be considered the front winner to win for Best Supporting Actor.

Also winning is Mélanie Laurent as Shoshanna Dreyfus, a survivor of the murderous Landa who is hiding out in Paris as a movie theater proprietor. When a German war hero (Daniel Brühl) takes a liking to her, she’s put in position to host a gala Nazi film premiere, and she plots to burn down the theater. Elsewhere, the Basterds are planning a similar line of attack with the help of German film star Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).

Although Inglourious Basterds is replete with the near-fetishistic depictions of violence that Tarantino has built a reputation on, these seem like less the centerpiece of this film than several extremely well crafted scenes that build from a slow burn to sizzling intensity. These include the film’s opening with Landa hunting for Jews at a dairy farmer’s home and a scene in a bar that begins with a card game and ends with a Mexican standoff.

Article Author: Dusty Somers

Dusty Somers hails from Seattle, and is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma with a B.A. in journalism. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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