Inglourious Basterds
The 2009 Bait & Switch award goes to this film, hands down. If you saw the trailer (that I refuse to link) and expect this to be a Tarantino action deal with Brad Pit killing ze Nazis, walk away. Brad Pitt isn’t even really a lead role in this. Instead, you get Mélanie Laurent trying to kill Hitler through hours of cloak ‘n dagger shit. Granted, Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, ‘n the rest are trying to kill Hitler also so there’s some crossroads style later, but only much later. The antagonist in the cloak & dagger stuff is super-detective Jew hunter Nazi Christoph Waltz, who appears to be very good at foiling plots.
That’s about it, really; hours of planning to kill Nazis with surprising lack of actually killing Nazis. It’s Valkyrie 2: Blood on the France as told by The Hardy Boys but the action is removed in place of laughing at Brad Pitt’s goofy accents. It’s a polished work as Quentin Tarantino is still very good at his craft. However, Tarantino is always the wild card of the industry and will always do whatever the hell he wants despite what the marketing team tricks you to expect. One of Tarantino’s strong attributes is the flow and detail of the conversations through many of his characters. Unfortunately, two-thirds of the film is subtitled in French and German, so much of that charisma is lost unless you’re trilingual or down with the foreign film scene.
Inglorious Basterds is not a bad film. Still, I honestly cannot recommend it in theater. DVD it when the opportunity arises. In the beginning, Brad Pitt says to something like seven people that all of them owe a hundred Nazi scalps. I was treated to images of four scalps. Somebody sure as hell owes me six hundred ninety-six scalps. My friend who we call “Life Coach” joined up on this and tells me he’s a pretty heavy Tarantino fan but this is the most mediocre movie he’s done. To tell you the truth, I got so bored I can’t even recall how the movie ends. Yeah it was 3am and I was fairly hammered. Either way, harsh times.
