Movie Review: Inglorious Basterds

I never really thought of myself as a Quentin Tarantino fan and still don't, for the most part. I appreciated Pulp Fiction as a good movie but wasn't really my thing and stuff like Kill Bill et al. just never appealed to me. Things changed with Django Unchained, a really good story with awesome acting that, despite its gratuitous violence, didn't really turn into a "Tarantino movie" until the very end when (SPOILER ALERT) an entire plantation's worth of people get their innards splattered against the wall.

Because of how much I liked that movie, I thought I'd give Tarantino's other recently critically acclaimed movie a shot. Plus, Christoph Waltz. I mean, c'mon.

Inglorious Basterds is the historically fictitious story of two separate plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler and a slew of other Nazi leaders at the exact same time. One of the plots comes from Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a young French Jewish woman whose family is shot by the vicious Nazi officer Hans Landa (Waltz) while trying to hide in a neighbor's floorboards. That scene tells you a lot about Shoshanna's fighting spirit and tragic tale but even more about Landa, equal parts brilliant and pure evil.

A few years after her escape, Shoshanna is living as Emmanuelle Mimieux, a cinema owner in Paris. She inadvertently catches the eye of Fredrick Zoller, whose recent heroics (the Nazi sniper killed hundreds of enemy soldiers while holed up by himself for three days in a bird's nest) are being turned into a Nazi propaganda film by Hitler's second-in-command Joseph Goebbels. In order to impress his new ladyfriend, Zoller convinces Goebbels to hold the film's premiere in her theater, much to her chagrin. But after she realizes that her theater will be full of Nazis, including Landa, she plots a way to burn the whole building down with them inside.

Meanwhile, the Basterds, a group of Jewish-American soldiers (with a couple of anti-Nazi Germans thrown in) headed by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), also hear of the premiere. This group is dedicated to killing Nazis in the most Tarantino-esque ways possible. In one 10-minute stretch, we see scalpings, throat-cuttings, and a guy get bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Raine's plan for the premiere is similar to Shoshanna's - all of Germany's worst baddies in the same small space is too good to turn down.

I won't ruin the end, but suffice to say that my attempt to keep a tally of on-screen deaths was futile when I was no longer able to keep the numbers straight.

Like Django, the movie had a vigilante justice theme with the least sympathetic villains ever. (Seriously, Nazis? Slave owners? I'm curious who Tarantino has left in his Most Hated People Ever drawer.) But while we had our obvious heroes in Django and King Schultz, the heroes in Inglorious Basterds are a little different, if only because there were almost too many of them. The two different plots were hard to keep track of, and even more so considering more than half the movie was in subtitles. One scene that takes place in a German bar had such weird lighting that it was almost impossible to read the yellow words. I found myself so focused on not missing what they were saying that I completely forgot who was talking at all.

This makes me sound like a simple American and that's probably true. I don't love subtitles for this reason. I doubly don't love subtitles when watching at home (I'm sure it was easier to read this stuff on a big movie screen). Oh well.

In the end, Inglorious Basterds leaned more toward Pulp Fiction than Django Unchained in my Tarantino Spectrum. I could appreciate the quality of the film, the intricacies of the plot, and the fantastic acting of Christoph Waltz, who is seriously just awesome. But I wouldn't say I loved it and I can't say I'd want to see it again.

Greatest Movies of All Time? Inglorious Basterds ranked in at No. 267, spurred by its Best Picture nomination. (Waltz won for Best Supporting Actor, although that didn't come into consideration for the GMoAT list.)