'Inglourious Basterds' Review

‘And the German will be sickened by us, and the German will talk about us, and the German will fear us. And when the German closes their eyes at night and they're tortured by their subconscious for the evil they have done, it will be with thoughts of us they are tortured with. Sound good?’

Those are Lt. Aldo Raine's words, from the new Tarantino blockbuster, ‘Inglourious Basterds’, an audacious ‘fantasy story’ about the World War II, where the Jews come out on top. And by the way, I did not misspell the title. That’s a deliberate error coming from Quentin Tarantino himself, as a first sign of what we are going to see in those 153 minutes: a lot of good acting, humor and distorted history.

You would think that the war subject doesn’t let you so many choices with the plot. But the wonder-child of Hollywood wants us to see something different from all the cliché movies that involve the Holocaust. So he defies history. The movie is divided into five chapters, each one with its own heading and follows two stories that are brought together at the end.

In the opening chapter, we are introduced to Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a French Jew girl, who escaped the massacre of her family, and will appear after three years under an assumed name, as the owner of a movie theatre from Paris. When she finds out that an important movie premiere will take place at her theatre, Shoshanna sees a way to turn the even into a conflagration, which will be very easy, seeing that on those times, the films were made from nitrate, which is highly flammable.

The other story follows the adventures of the afore-mentioned Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his group of American ‘Basterds’, whose only goal was to kill Nazis. The ‘Basterds’ were specialized in scalping The Nazis and carving swastikas into their foreheads, so that they would never forget who they were and what they did. Later in the movie, the infamous group is charged to blow up a theater that would be brimful of Nazis and kill as many of Hitler's top men as possible. And of course, the theater in question is the one owned by Shosanna.

The movie ends with bloodshed, revenge, Nazis scalps, dead people and a murdered Hitler. Watching ‘Inglourious Basterds’ will make you understand that the movie is not about sacrifice, but about the bloody, the dirty side of the war. You will hear a lot of dark humor, along with violence and the foot-fetish, which will corroborate that the movie is 100% a Tarantino one.

I could not end this review without mentioning the marvelous acting of Christoph Waltz as the Nazi "Jew Hunter" Col. Hans Landa, who is the most charismatic character in the movie. He is so twisted and despicable and with so many great lines, that’s impossible not to like him. Great acting and character contouring from Brad Pitt - with his Southern twang, as well as Melanie Laurent and Diane Kruger, both in roles of femme-fatale.

All in all, ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is another Tarantino masterpiece, a testimony that he successfully uses his skills of both writing and directing, and on which he imposes his trademarks and known quality.

So ‘That’s a Bingo!’ !