From its misspelled title, to its man’s-man Sergio Leone style, to its “Kill Bill” quirkiness, writer/director Quentin Tarantino is back on his game with a masterpiece (and happy to admit that in the last line of the movie.) It’s Nazi-occupied France during WWII, and the Germans “Jew Hunters” brutally kill the family of young Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent). On the other side of the fence are “The Basterds” led by Lt Aldo (Brad Pitt) who’s in the business of “killing Nazis” as he explains in his amusing southern trailer-trash accent (a deadpan style he carries effectively through the entire film.) His gang of soldiers – a sort of “Oceans 11” of WWII bad boys – are on a mission of instilling fear into the Third Reich. Sometimes they even kill and scalp them. There’s Sgt Hugo (Til Schweiger) who killed 13 Gestapo officers. There’s the killer soldier “the Bear” from Boston with a fetish for Ted William’s swings and a wooden bat across a German’s forehead. But, no matter who they are, each unknown actor acts the hell out of this movie! Even Diane Kruger as a German actress turned spy carries her weight among the boys as the sexy Bridget von Hammersmark.
But when the Basterds cross the path of the very French-Jewish girl (whose family was murdered) and she now runs a Paris cinema, they’ve found the perfect place to premiere a movie that Hitler will assumedly attend. There’s lots of Oscar worthy acting of no-names here, but the king of them all is German actor Christopher Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa. His scenes lend a tick tock factor of tension; men confronting men (Sergio Leone) and a slow pacing that tells you that at any given moment everybody will most likely get their heads blown off. Tarantino draws his own conclusion through ongoing sensationalism in bringing us to his version of a history lesson on the Third Reich and how it ends. Tarrentino utilizes the irony of great German cinema (including G.W. Pabst and Emil Jannings in his movie) but at the same time longing to burn the Germans. The film is about twenty minute too long but somehow forgiven and worth every second. Three and a half tiaras