August 26, 2009 -- Quentin Tarantino's violent, talky, overlong, WWII fantasy featuring an alternate world history is at times a slasher movie gorefest, an action movie, a Jewish revenge flick and sometimes a “my dinner with Fritz” boring talkfest. Any hopes that the maturity Mr. Tarantino showed in Jackie Brown would somehow return are dashed in this ultraviolent movie that is sometimes entertaining, but too often demonstrates overindulgence of adolescent tastes. Maybe just because of that, this appears to be Tarantino's most successful film in years, perhaps ever.

A story told in five disjointed chapters, the first introduces us to one of the film's pivotal characters, a Nazi SS officer, Col. Hans Landa (played by Christoph Waltz). As Hans chats interminably with a French farmer, the audience must endure the first of several “My dinner with Fritz” episodes in which the pace of the film grinds to a complete halt. Eventually, something besides talk happens and we move on to the next episode where the film's one star, Brad Pitt, appears as a redneck part-Indian commando leader, Lt. Aldo Raine. Raine becomes known to the Germans as “The Apache” because he collects scalps from German soldiers. He demands 100 scalps from each of his men. Tarantino actually shows some of the scalps being cut from heads in gruesome detail. It is like he forgot the example of restraint that he exhibited in the ear-cutting scene in “Reservoir Dogs.” Leaving something to the imagination is often more effective than a graphic depiction.

Another chapter shows a chance encounter between a young French woman, Shosanna Dreyfus (played by Mélanie Laurent) and a young handsome German war hero, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl). Zoller is the Audie Murphy of Germany. He stars in a movie about his own war exploits in which he single-handedly kills hundreds of the enemy. Despite Shosanna's repeated attempts to rebuff Zoller's advances, he still pursues her to the point of arranging the premier of his movie to be held at the Paris theater that Shosanna owns. Little does he know that Shosanna is not only immune to his charms, but she plans to kill him and all the other top German officers and French collaborators attending the film premiere. The “Basterd” commandoes also come up with a similar plan to attack the theater when they learn that Adolph Hitler himself, and other top Nazi leaders, will attend the show. The confluence of events also attracts Col. Hans Landa, and a double agent, German movie star Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) for a deadly night at the movies.

It should be noted here that although there are some very strong woman characters in this film, it does have one of the most misogynist ic scenes I have ever seen. A young woman is strangled to death in a scene which lovingly celebrates the woman's murder. The savage, unprovoked, intimate manual strangulation is smothered in sexual overtones. The scene also demonstrates the man's power over the woman by using his brute strength. This is not a date movie. This same woman, it should be noted, commits a murder of her own earlier in the movie. The strangulation scene is pure murder, one of many murders which take place during the film. Most of the killings in the film are murder, rather than typical combat killings one sees in war films where it is a kill or be killed situation. More typical in this film is the scene were a German army sergeant is beaten to death with a baseball bat for refusing to reveal troop positions to the American commandoes.

For all the film's gaudy adolescent preoccupation with murder, mutilation, mayhem and grisly humor, there is a serious side to it as well. Is it O.K. to trade the lives of a few civilians in order to potentially save the lives of millions? Lt. Aldo Raine gives Tarantino's answer in the film after considering the matter for a few seconds, “hell yeah.” Raine also approves doing deals with Nazis if it means ending the war faster. The film also endorses the use of torture to get information during war. The movie makes a pretty clear rejection of the Geneva Conventions regarding the rules of war and an endorsement of the Bush-Cheney idea of anything goes as long as it is done by the “good guys.” This is not a new idea, murder, torture, scalps. It's all been done before. The idea is you have to descend to the level of the enemy, or even lower, to win a war. This does not constitute deep thought, but at least it seems some thinking is going on. That is more than you can say for a lot of films. While this film is a mixed bag, it is entertaining. It is too long with too many boring conversations, but it does have its moments of ghoulish humor, action and plot twists. It is almost worth watching just because of its odd cast, including lots of good European actors not well known in America, along with the likes of comic Mike Myers (“The Love Guru”) as a heavily-made-up British general and the near-Octogenarian actor Rod Taylor (who starred in the original 1960 film “The Time Machine”) playing Winston Churchill, of all people. This film rates a C+.

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Copyright © 2009 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
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