Should I Go And See Inglourious Basterds?
Yes, you probably should.
Tarantino’s new film Inglourious Basterds sees many a Nazi soldier in need of a hair transplant, after Brad Pitt’s band of merry murdering men go around with their scalping blades at the ready.
It’s Tarantino, and you have to expect the unexpected – you have to expect the worst. But happily, this is not the ‘worst’ in terms of his filmmaking, nor indeed in terms of being unnecessarily blood thirsty. The guy has never really hit the heights of Pulp Fiction, but this film makes a very good effort indeed.
You get the feeling Quentin has held back from going completely mental on this film. It certainly takes its cue from films such as Kelly’s Heroes (1970) – where Clint Eastwood gets a band of cheeky, hippy type soldiers and takes them off to Nazi Germany in search of Gold.
In Tarantino’s remake of Enzo Castellari’s 1978 The Inglorious Basterds, the gold sought in Kelly’s Heroes takes the form of Nazi scalps. The mission of the Jewish American squad is to go behind enemy lines and strike fear in the heart of Germans by murdering them in quite a gruesome fashion (think baseball bats if you will) and gouging swastikas into the foreheads of survivors.
Without giving too much of the plot away, the story lines converge on a Parisian cinema where the latest Nazi propaganda film is to be premiered. It transpires that every top brass in the Nazi regime will be present – including everyone’s favourite war-starter – Adolf J. Hitler.
Some stunning cinematography guides us to the thrilling climax, where bullets and blood fly a plenty. It would have been good if the card guessing game scene was a little shorter – and that Fassbender’s British spy has his loose end tied up (he gets shot but we don’t really find out if he was despatched properly until right at the end, when the film concludes without his reappearance). I know Tarantino likes to kill folks off when you least expect it, but I thought Fassbender was going to last a little longer, keeping the (very very) British end up.
At the end of the film, the scene that really stands out is the one at the beginning, where the ‘Jew Hunter’ (the primary Nazi baddie) seeks out a family of Jews being hidden by a French farmer. Tarantino really builds the suspense in this opening scene, as well as offering the viewer some truly beautiful shots and lots of original, thrilling dialogue. The farmer is put in a terrible, no win situation – something that Quentin likes to put into his films.
This is classic Tarantino. Watch it now.
