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Inglourious Basterds review
:. Director: Quentin Tarantino
:. Starring: Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger
:. Running Time: 2:28
:. Year: 2009
:. Country: USA
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Following famous figures like Stanley Kubrick or Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino delivers his war film, which is undoubtedly his most ambitious, but also his laziest — of course, he's bring his personal touch. But here, after a long, rather promising opening sequence, showing the massacre of a Jewish family hidden under the floor of French farm, at the conclusion of an interminable interrogation where the tension settles progressively and the verbal exchanges get more nervous, Inglorious Basterds loses itself in a vast caricature. Witness the representation of Adolf Hitler, physically closer in resemblance to Sadam Hussein than to the historical figure, showing all of his destructive madness, but without subtlety.
With its international casting and ambitious subject, a lot was expected from this much-anticipated film, which could have been used as a playing field for Tarantino's art. As the title implies, the story simply follows a troop of particularly sanguinary American soldiers, chasing Nazis and scalping their victims. One won't know much else about these basterds, since the film will not go into character development and does not give them any scene of anthology except for this sequence where a German officer undergoes a muscular interrogation which ends in a smashed cranium by blows of a baseball bat. Even the famous scene known as the Louisiana, where a German actress, a double agent, finds the basterds in a tavern, charged with fomenting an attack against the big shots of Reich, doesn't manage to exist outside the memory of similar scenes already seen in Tarantino's previous films. And even the finale, heavy with symbolism (cinema puts an end to the conflict, at the conclusion of its destruction in flames) on the power of cinema, doesn't allow to take the film to the next level.
More must be demanded of Tarantino. Admittedly, his spaghetti western way of filming a father observing the arrival of the Nazis from a distance at the top of a hill, fatally anticipating the drama to come, or his way of stretching the scenes by filling them with truculent dialogue before letting violence emerge, and his pleasure in mixing humor and dramatic tension in the same scene, save the film from boredom. One could have had a good time. But the film doesn't abandon its entertaining function, never attempting to pursue any reflection, whether it's on the genre to which it claims to belong (Tarantino does not make use of the WWII framework solely as a context), or on the themes recurrent in the director's work such as revenge.
At first glance seductive, given that the Tarantinian touch is recognizable in each scene, Inglorious Basterds allows itself to be viewed as an object of pure entertainment, but leaves an after-taste of frustration as a big schoolboy prank. Unfortunate.
Moland Fengkov
 Movie Reviews since 2012
Reviews since 2012
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