Review: Inglourious Basterds

"Inglourious Basterds" is a violent fairy tale, an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich. Quentin Tarantino's long-gestating war saga invests a long-simmering revenge plot with reworkings of innumerable genre conventions, but only fully finds its tonal footing about halfway through, after which it's off to the races. By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director. Several explosive scenes and the names of Tarantino and topliner Brad Pitt promise brawny commercial prospects, especially internationally, as the preponderance of subtitled dialogue might put off a certain slice of the prospective domestic audience.

In no meaningful way based upon Enzo G. Castellari's schlock 1978 Italian WWII programmer of the same title, Tarantino's deliberately misspelled namesake has been in the oven for many years, initially as a would-be "The Dirty Dozen"-style bad boys "mission" adventure and until very recently as a massive miniseries-length epic spanning the entire war. The narrow mission focus has prevailed in the end, but not in the way that might have been expected, as the group of Jewish avengers led by Pitt's Tennessee Lt. Aldo Raine rep only one component of a vast ensemble that feeds into a Nazi-foiling plot only a hardcore film buff could have dreamed up.

In fact, the best characters are non-Yanks, all of whom speak their own languages and one or two others to boot. But this commendable gesture toward linguistic accuracy is virtually the only realistic aspect of the picture, which otherwise soars on its flights of fancy and deliberate anachronisms -- the use of David Bowie's "Putting Out the Fire" at a crucial point is particularly inispired -- and flattens out only when Tarantino gets too carried away with over-elaborated dialogue scenes, a problem that could easily be addressed with some slight trimming between now and the skedded August opening.

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