REVIEW: ‘Inglourious Basterds’

By now, you know what you’re going to get when you go to see a Quentin Tarantino movie – a wild ride interspersed with some of the best-written dialogue in film today. With every movie he’s made, he’s raised the bar on himself. When “Inglourious Basterds” was announced, I rubbed my hands together with glee. QT takes on the Nazis with Brad Pitt and Eli Roth? Sign me up.

So, why did I walk out of the theater wondering what went wrong?

Okay, stop. Back up. Here’s everything that went right with “Basterds,” and there’s a lot to love.

“Inglourious Basterds” is both a tribute to the great World War II films that came before it – if you look closely, you can see elements of “Force 10 From Navarone,” “The Dirty Dozen,” or “The Great Escape” – and a fully modern take on terrorizing Hitler’s men behind enemy lines. There’s not a lot of moral ambiguity when you’re fighting Nazis, and Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt) has a crew of Jewish Nazi killers that are very good at their task. They’re highly brutal, as the gig calls for. That said, this is a far less bloody movie than the trailers would lead you to believe. If Tarantino has learned one thing over the years, it’s that the gore you don’t see is sometimes more powerful than the gore you do see on screen.

Also at the top of his game is their counterpart, Colonel Hans Landa, who has earned the nickname “the Jew Hunter.” At the start of the film, we see that he’s not only thorough with his task of finding Jews that have escaped Hitler’s directive of shipping off each and every Jew in occupied France, but almost gleeful in his work. Christoph Waltz is sensational as Landa: he attacks the role with a zest that is nothing short of electric.

I wanted to love it so badly… and, for a good portion of it (including every sequence with Pitt’s Basterds in it), it didn’t disappoint. When the movie is firing on all cylinders, as the Basterds race towards their date in Paris at the premiere of a Goebbels-helmed propaganda film, “Inglourious Basterds” is vintage Tarantino, on par with his best work.

…but, I swear, Quentin really needs to learn to edit his dialogue better.

Tarantino’s greatest strength – fantastic dialogue – is also his Achilles’ heel. When there’s an exchange between characters that can be drawn out far longer than it possibly should, you’d better believe Tarantino will do it.

I love QT dialogue when it serves the greater purpose of pushing the film along. I’m in a small camp of people who think “Jackie Brown” is Quentin’s best movie, and that had some of the most egregious uses of long diatribes in any of his movies. But there’s really something to be said about BREVITY. During one scene in particular, midway through the film, I thought I was going to fall asleep. In a Quentin Tarantino film..

Let’s be clear, here: I am not one of those people that thinks longer movies are of the devil. If the story supports it, you won’t find me looking at my watch, wondering if we’re at the last lap yet. However, just because theaters will allow a 150-minute run time doesn’t mean all movies need to be that long. If there’s a filmmaker that needs room to breathe, it’s Tarantino… but with no one around to “keep him honest,” he allows his dialogue to run rampant, and the flow of the film suffers greatly for it.

“Inglourious Basterds” is a really good movie – one of the summer’s best – but there’s about 15 minutes of dialogue that keeps it from being a truly great film.