Reel To Reel: Inglourious Basterds

Kill Bill? No, Kill Adoph!

Going Rate: A must for film geeks and Tarantino buffs. Everybody else: stick to Saving Private Ryan
Starring: Brad Pitt
Rated: R
Red Flags: Intense Graphic War Violence and Brutality! One brief (under 10 seconds) scene of Sexuality

Director Quentin Tarantino doesn't make films as much as remix them. Thus Inglourious Basterds is a cross-pollination of spaghetti westerns, war pictures and 70's action melodramas with a taste of blaxploitation here and there. It's bogus history but rollicking entertainment, a revenge film that satifies our hatred of maniacal bigots the same way Rambo: First Blood Part II won the Vietnam war for us on celluloid.

Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt) leads a gang of Jewish-American Nazi hunters known as "The Basterds" who take no prisoners. "We will be cruel to the Germans and through our cruelty they will know who we are," he says in his southern-drawled command cadence. "They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, disfigured bodies their brothers we leave behind us and the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, at our boot heels, and the edge of our knives." He demands 100 scalps from each recruit, taking inspiration from the Indian wars. Raine's gang goes about Europe, dirtier than the Dirty Dozen ever were, although the worst of their violence is confined to only one sequence, where a Nazi sergeant is clubbed to death with a baseball bat.

His counterpart is Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a suave and intelligent but merciless Jew hunter whose flattery usually means you're gonna die. In the film's opening scenes, he talks up a French farmer as a prelude to murdering a Jewish family. Only one of them escapes, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who re-emerges later as a cinema owner. She draws the affections of war-hero sniper Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), whose exploits are the inspiration for a propaganda film to be debuted on her screen with most of the German High Command in attendance, including Hitler himself. Dreyfus formulates a revenge plan that will make The Towering Inferno look like A Night To Remember. Lt. Raine hears about the premiere through a rendezvous gone wrong involving a French film star. He formulates his own tit-for-tat maneuver, although we're never really sure if he knows about the one already in development.

The film's gritty violence earns the hard-R rating, but there's far much more dialogue than shooting, accounting for most of the film's two-hour plus run time. Tarantino clearly loves his character's lines -- mostly in German or French with subtitles. Although they're loaded with wit, a couple of scenes could stand a few more cuts. I'm also not sure about his device of occasionally leaving a common French word untranslated in the subtitle, where oui shows up as "Oui." Maybe it's to keep us on the ball.

Many of the picture's characters are drawn to near parody. I've mentioned Raine's good-'ol-boy drawl, but a pair of British officers come across so effeminate they could've walked straight out of a Monty Python sketch. And Hitler is just nuts: "Nein, nein, nein, nein, nein!" Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You love it. You know you do.

The movie strongly hints at what Sergio Leone might have done with a war picture, with its swells of Ennio Morricone-inspired music. Otherwise, it's Tarantino being Tarantino, the movie geek who shares his love of film by turning his favorite genres into dark comedy.