365+ movies in 365 Days: Day 142 - Inglourious Basterds

This might be one of those occasions where I have heard so much about a film that my expectations could not be met. Inglourious Basterds is an over the top, violent, humorous, alternate reality WWII film, but the whole film is less then the sum of it's parts.

At 2 hours and 33 minutes the film is overly long and there are scenes that get bogged down in Quentin Tarantino's love of dialogue. But the there are scenes that are so tense they almost sizzle on the screen. Most of these scenes feature actor Christoph Waltz as SS Colonel Hans Landa. Waltz delivers a performance that is so good he appears menacing when he is drinking a glass of milk. He received many awards and accolades for this role, including the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

The film follows two parallel stories that meet but never combine. The first features a Melanie Laurent as a french Jew who escaped from Landa earlier in the film and is now living under a new identity and operating a small cinema in Nazi occupied Paris. By a twist of fate the Nazi high command has decided to hold the premiere of a new propaganda film in her theatre. She decides to use this opportunity to burn the theatre down and kill as many Nazis as she can

The other story features Brad Pitt as Lieutenant Aldo Raines, an American Jew and leader of a band of Jewish American commando's operating behind enemy lines and striking fear into the hearts of German soldiers. When the British high command hears about the movie premiere they order Raines and his "Inglourious Basterds" to blow-up the theatre.

The story resembles films like The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare and the 1977 film Inglorious Bastards, but the resemblance stops there. The film is filled with extreme violence done with humor. The Americans commit atrocities as bad as the Nazi's and there is plenty of anachronistic music and dialogue to go around. Tarantino's love of film is evident in many of the references to other movies throughout the film. The first hour of the film is glacial and the second hour goes by in a heartbeat, but it's the last 30 minutes where the film veers off course with a revenge fantasy ending to WWII that is an orgy of violence.

I had a great time watching the movie, but I didn't like it as much as I though I would. Not a masterpiece by any measure, but great fun and an astounding acting turn by Christoph Waltz.

At The Movie House rating *** stars