It is a massive, hard-core, American war movie that Tarantino entwines in European filigree of nostalgia and the memory of classic foreign films
Inglourious Basterds runs for two and a half hours but you hardly notice it. It's an exhilarating, fascinating twist on modern history and also a resonant tribute to the golden age of gung ho World War Two movies. It has been years since we have seen such an exuberant "guts and glory" epic. That, in itself, makes it the best movie Tarantino has made since Pulp Fiction.
It is filled with serpentine plot lines, moments of savage violence and reams of dialogue. This is perhaps the most verbal of all his movies, but Tarantino balances the avalanche of words with a visual style that knocks you back in your seat.
While it looks and sounds exactly like a World War Two movie, it is actually set in what one could only describe as a parallel universe that looks exactly the same as our real universe - but where events run counter to what we know from history.
I don't want to spoil the film's biggest surprises so I am being deliberately vague, but all the big events of World War Two movies are there, with the iconic characters, like Churchill and Hitler.
The difference is that you will never find this story in any history book. The script offers an "if only..." version of "a war that never was". I know that sounds way too cryptic, but once you have seen the movie, you will know exactly how clever and audacious it is.
Another surprise is the quality and rough energy of Brad Pitt's performance as the brutal, red neck Lieutenant Aldo Raine. He has what you might call "the Lee Marvin role" playing an impervious, tenacious officer who has put together a military kill squad.
Tarantino is deliberately referencing Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967), a film about convicted killers and rapists who were recruited into a unique undercover hit-squad that used their criminal skills to kill Nazis.
In this film, that covert squad consists solely of Jews who are aware of the Nazi's genocidal actions and their plans for a "final solution"; they have just one motivation, and that is to kill all the Nazis they can find in occupied France.
It is typical of Tarantino's quirky imagination that Pitt, the star of the show, and his squad of lethal bastards, disappear from the film for 20 minutes at a time. Not many directors would let their leading man and plot concept vanish for such long stretches, but that is where Tarantino's chutzpah pays off.
He has another tale to tell, this one about a heroine, Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent). She's a Jewish woman who has been on the run after being forced to witness the murder of her family by the Nazis, led by the obsessive Jew-hater Colonel Landa, played by Christoph Walz, who takes the acting honours for his performance.
She is the sole survivor of her family and she is vengeful. Like Raine and his killer squad, she wants vengeance and we watch her create a convoluted plot to get even. But Tarantino, being the great movie buff that he is, brings something unique to her story. Shoshanna is running a movie house in Paris, and that insertion of a movie motif into the story is a brilliant Tarantino touch that allows him to talk about his great love - the movies.
There is a sequence where Shoshanna is discussing the artistic merits of the French comedian, Max Linder, who was a major inspiration for Charlie Chaplin. In the midst of all this peril and bloodshed, there is an intellectual debate about the thin line between tribute and plagiarism.
The scene is, itself, perfectly rendered but it is like an echo-chamber for all the movies Tarantino references during the film. Aldo Raine, Pitt's character, evokes memories of popular B-grade tough-guy actor Aldo Ray. This movie has the structure of The Dirty Dozen; it bears the title of an Italian movie; it features actors like Rod Taylor, a veteran who was in one of Tarantino's favourite films, The Dark of the Sun.
It is a massive, hard-core, American war movie that Tarantino entwines in European filigree of nostalgia and the memory of classic foreign films.
German actress Diane Kruger enhances the European feel by playing the blonde femme fatale. Alert film buffs will relish this scavenger hunt.
One of his most audacious tricks is to ensure that Raine, the hero of the one story line, and Shoshanna, the heroine of the other, who would probably have become a romantic item in a conventional Hollywood melodrama, never even meet. It is, however, the film's dramatic resolution.
Tarantino has won many awards , but the Oscar has always eluded him. This sprawling, compulsive, savage and fascinating film should do the trick.
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