Inglourious Basterds

Viewer Rating:Mick Jordan has rated Inglourious Basterds rating: 4 Star

I went into “Inglorious Basterds” expecting to see something like “The Dirty Eagles of Navarone” but what I got was akin to “The Good, The Bad and The War”. The opening credits (and music) look like a classic Spaghetti Western from the 1960s and when the opening scene shows a poor dirt farmer chopping wood on a barren landscape you start to wonder is this meant to be a very early flash-back. Luckily the arrival of a Nazi staff car at the farm soon puts paid to that. This long opening scene (“Chapter 1 -Once Up on A Time in Nazi-occupied France”) is a typical Tarantino dialogue driven sequence in a film that is filled with them. It also shows us that far from avoiding cliches the film is determined to embrace them: - the dialogue starts off in French but after a few lines the German officer tells the French farmer that he would rather speak in English as he has a better grasp of it than French, luckily the farmer has a good grasp of it too. Tarantino then turns that on its head by having the bulk of the rest of the film in German, French and a little Italian. The film itself consists of two separate plots moving ever closer together until they join up with a spectacular climax. The “Basterds” themselves are a small group of Jewish Avengers sent into occupied France with the sole purpose of killing and scalping Nazis – oh and beating the odd one to death with a baseball bat – oh and shooting the odd one in the testicles and sticking a knife in his neck – oh and carving Swastikas into the foreheads of those rare few they allow to live and tell the tale. – It's a Quentin Tarantino film. Meanwhile a young Jewish girl lives in constant fear of being found out – with her black boyfriend – in the cinema she owns. Suddenly she is presented with a chance to destroy the top Nazi elite just as the Basterds independently spot the same opportunity. Linking the two plot strands is a Nazi “Jew Hunter” played by Christopher Waltz who gives an excellent performance managing to be equally menacing in German, French, English and a little Italian. The film is an absolute joy for film buffs (particularly this one) and is filled with pointed references to classic German cinema – G.W. Pabst and Leni Riefenstahl are mentioned constantly and there's even a few subtle references to Louise Brooks, just for me. I loved this film, it's funny, it's mad, it's over the top and it's just hugely entertaining. There is no Sturges, there is no Aldrich there is only Quentin Tarantino!

Review published on the 18 September 2009 14:31