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Quentin Tarantino Review Day Six

Published

11 years ago

January 7, 2016

Admin

At War With Itself

♦ With the release of Hateful Eight in the UK on 8 January, we thought we would take another look at the previous seven films of Quentin Tarantino. It’ll be one per day, and today is the turn of his sixth film, Inglorious Basterds, released back in 2009.

Inglourious Basterds

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Stars: Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Eli Roth, Christophe Waltz

Five years passed between Kill Bill Vol.2 and Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s first stab at a war film. The decline had started with Kill Bill, where Tarantino’s career had reached such a peak that he could do no wrong with critics, no matter how indulgent or weak his films were. Inglourious Basterds, which tells the story of a group of Jewish army commandos led by Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) wreaking havoc in Germany during the second world war, made Kill Bill look like Citizen Kane in terms of focus.
Inglorious Basterds does open strongly: we are introduced to SS Colonel Max Landa (Christophe Waltz), a man whose mission is to hunt down all of France’s remaining Jews. The first scene, even though it feels like a slightly clumsy homage to Once Upon A Time in the West, is most involving – Tarantino succeeds in creating a real sense of tension here between Landa and the farmer, Marcel, who has been harbouring a Jewish family. However it is all downhill from here. It is evident from the start that Tarantino attempted to make an updated Kelly’s Heroes, replete with a disparate yet rather anonymous group of adventurers hell-bent on bringing down the Third Reich. However, taking on a far more ambitious canvas on which to paint his story proved to be his undoing.
Casting, once the director’s strong suit, is all over the place here. Waltz is very good as Landa, as is Melanie Laurent as Jewish girl Shoshanna, the only survivor of the SS raid that kicked off the film. However, Brad Pitt is terrible as chief US commando Aldo Raine and the rest of the Inglourious Basterds come across as upmarket Keystone Kops, scalping Nazis for fun whilst trying to embody Tarantino-esque cool. Real-life movie schlockmeister Eli Roth is out of his depth as Sgt Donnie Donowitz, while the rest of the crew are also pretty forgettable. The other sin that Tarantino committed here was to introduce future heavyweight Michael Fassbender as British commando Lt Archie Hicox only to kill him off about forty minutes later. So Fassbender was totally wasted here. The tone also suffers from the director’s worst excesses: it segues from gritty drama to cartoonish comedy within minutes. The closing scene where Hitler is killed in a blazing Parisian cinema is one of the most misguided and poorly handled in modern Hollywood history. The death of Hitler here is another misstep: you can only suspend your disbelief so far when watching a movie. Everyone knows that this plainly wasn’t the case, the historical liberty-taking ruining credibility for the sake of gaudy wish-fulfillment. It was obvious that Tarantino didn’t know how to end this film, his overarching obsession with its premise leading him to neglect its structure and logic. Inglorious Basterds was the first real miscalculation in the director’s oeuvre. It feels like a final year project by a film student who has immersively studied all the greats but has no understanding as to how to emulate them, throwing everything into the pot on the pretext that whatever develops will work.