Inglourious Basterds

Running Time: Just under three hours

MPAA Rating: R

The Inglourious Basterds (as spelled the “Tarantino Way”) are a small group of American soldiers who hate Nazis. Yes, I know that everybody hates Nazis, but believe me when I say that this group really, really hates them. So much so that they dedicate themselves to being as unspeakably cruel and inhumane to German soldiers as those soldiers are to Jews and other groups. Scalping, branding, and torture are not out of bounds for these men in their attempt to terrorize monsters. An unrelated Jewish woman, whose family has been murdered by the infamous “Jew Hunter”, seeks revenge while operating a small movie theater in France. Both parties see incredible opportunity when all major players in the Third Reich (including Adolf Hitler) make plans to attend a screening at that theater.

Those who are expecting an action-packed war movie filled with fights and battle scenes may be disappointed. Director Quentin Tarantino is well known to add long dialogue scenes for character development and, considering this to be his magnum opus, he makes full use of that reputation. Scenes of murder and mayhem are few and far between, so the more ADHD in the audience may want to catch a final screening of Transformers 2 to fill up their extra three hours.

Watching this movie is reminiscent of reading a novel. Plot development moves along at a snail’s pace, but is very interesting when making strides. There is a copious amount of subtitle reading to be done, so essentially the viewer is reading a book without having to imagine the descriptions themselves. This would be well and good in moderation, but as it is in excess it just makes for an egregiously long film.

Expectations of a gung-ho shoot ‘em up are paralleled in the Nazi propaganda film that the members of the German army attend. Clips of a famous sniper-turned-actor killing American soldiers serve to taunt the thrill seekers in the real audience with the inverse what could have been a Brad Pitt no-holds-barred action movie. In fact, especially for being the principle character in advertising campaigns, Pitt and the other basterds get very little screen time. A more accurate main character based on screen time would be Colonel Hans Landa, the despicable and accurately titled “Jew Hunter” of the SS who is the root cause of most of the film’s plot points.

Since the movie is almost completely fictitious and because most characters reveal themselves to be fluent English-speakers, I really don’t understand why there needed to be so many subtitled scenes. They significantly hinder the film’s viewability. One cannot even take notice of the acting on screen while racing to read translation blocks in the time before the next one pops up. There are also plenty of inconsequential scenes that could have been cut to keep the movie at a reasonable length. It is somewhat pointless to have 15 minutes of character development when 2 are spent on moving the plot forward and 1 is spent killing everybody we just spent our time learning about. The final act may justify all of the parts that drag, though. For a brief time the action lovers get their inglourious heroes and Nazi-killing is the name of the game. It may take a select type of viewer to thoroughly enjoy the movie up to that point, however.

Actual Rating: The bounteous level of gruesome violence combined with the fact that this movie tosses in nearly every other movie rating vice in the industry for good measure definitely warrants this one an NC-17. The gory scenes are comparable to Eli Roth’s “torture-porn” Hostel movies and are definitely not suitable for young viewers.